The title is in all caps and so is the track, a short violent burst of HIGHSOCIETY refusing to use an indoor voice. This landed on Dim Mak, heavy bass music built for the exact moment a festival crowd has been promised a reason to come apart. The drop is all serrated edges, the kind of mid-tempo bass design that sounds like machinery coming apart on purpose, metal-on-metal textures stacked until they turn into rhythm. There is no subtlety anywhere in it and subtlety would be a betrayal of the title. HIGHSOCIETY have carved out a lane in the heavier, nastier end of bass, and CRITICAL MASS is them planting a flag in it with both boots. The first drop made me flinch, and I hear enough of these a week to be genuinely hard to startle. It is short and brutal and very good at spiking a room’s blood pressure on cue.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.