IYRE x Makoto - SKYLINE FEVER

This is the most alive I’ve felt about liquid dnb in a long while, and I’ve been trying to work out exactly why. Makoto has been making warm, musical drum and bass since before half the current scene owned a laptop, and pairing him with IYRE hands “Skyline Fever” both the polish and the hunger it needs. The intro fakes you out with these gorgeous jazzy keys, all Sunday-morning calm, and then the break kicks in and it’s suddenly 4am and you are not remotely tired anymore. The bassline sits round and full without ever going soft, and the drums have that rolling, tumbling quality that good liquid completely depends on. There’s a vocal chop floating over the second half that I can’t make out a single word of and have stopped trying to; it works far better as pure texture than it ever would as a lyric. What really gets me is the warmth of the thing. So much drum and bass right now aims for cold and clinical and calls it maturity, and this one just wants you to feel good about being awake at an unreasonable hour. I stuck it on a morning commute and somehow arrived somewhere better than I left. Makoto still has every bit of it, and IYRE is clearly paying close attention to the right teacher. The kind of collaboration where you can’t tell where the veteran ends and the newcomer starts, which is the entire point of doing one.

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