Justin Hawkes has quietly become one of the most reliable names in dancefloor drum and bass, and Stomp is him doing what he does best, which is make something that detonates a room without overcomplicating it. The build is patient, the kind that has a whole crowd’s hands creeping up before the drop even hits, then it pays off with this big stomping low end that earns the title literally. Hawkes always brings a little musicality to his heavier stuff, so even when this thing is bouncing your skull around there’s a hook holding it together. It’s festival DnB engineered for maximum hands-in-the-air payoff, and there’s no shame in that. Sometimes you don’t want a puzzle, you want a track that picks the whole tent up at once. This does exactly that. UKF knew what they had when they put it up. Save it for the moment you need a room to lose its collective mind, because that’s the only thing Stomp was built to do.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.