Jack Garratt - Higher

If you lost track of Jack Garratt after the 2016 hype cycle chewed him up, Higher is a good reason to check back in. He was briefly anointed the future of British music, won the BRITs Critics’ Choice, and then mostly stepped away to deal with the weight of all that, which is its own long story. This track is him doing the thing he was always best at, a huge gospel-sized vocal welded to electronic production that lurches between delicate and enormous with no warning. The drop is less a drop than a full-body swell, organ-ish synths and a beat that stomps in late and hard. His voice is the instrument here, cracking at the top of the range in a way that reads as effort rather than a plugin. There is a rawness to it the glossy MrSuicideSheep catalogue does not usually carry. It feels like a man who has something to prove again, and that hunger is all over the recording. Good to have him back and sounding like he means it.

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