You know the exact feeling this track is built to produce: hands up, eyes shut, festival at dusk, that big melodic-techno surge that’s become the default emotion of European dancefloors. Kevin de Vries is one of the main architects of that sound, the strain Afterlife turned into a religion, and “Be My Own” with Stylo and MONTE is the formula at full power. A brooding arpeggio, a vocal drowned in reverb and longing, a long climb toward a drop that swaps bass weight for pure altitude. I’ll be honest that this sound is everywhere now, sanded into a template by a hundred producers chasing the same sunset, and plenty of it bores me stiff these days. This one doesn’t, mostly because the arpeggio actually moves, mutating under the vocal instead of parking on a single loop, and the drop lands with real force behind it. De Vries helped write this rulebook, and it shows in the small decisions the imitators tend to skip. If you’ve got any appetite left for the Afterlife sound at all, this is one of the better recent examples of it.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.