Enormous. “Illuminate Me” is built for a room with a proper light rig and no seats. HIGHSOCIETY has a knack for this kind of festival-ready melodic bass, and pairing it with Gracie Van Brunt’s soaring vocal gives the track a top end that actually earns the title. The build is patient — it holds the tension a beat longer than you expect before the drop cracks open at 1:30 — and when it lands, it’s all widescreen synths and a bassline that punches from underneath. Dim Mak has always had one foot in the festival world and this is a clean example of why that works. What lifts it above the pack is Van Brunt; her voice cuts through the wall of sound instead of drowning in it, and the moment right before the drop where everything strips back to just her and a single piano note is the best five seconds here. There’s nothing understated about it, and that’s the point — this is music engineered to make a crowd throw their hands up on cue. On headphones it’s a lot; in the setting it was built for, it’s exactly right. Big, bright, and unashamed.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.