Laeko - DONT WANNA KNOW!!!

The bassline in DONT WANNA KNOW!!! has a little hiccup built into it, a dropped sixteenth that makes the whole groove trip and catch itself every bar, and that stumble is what I can’t stop listening to. Laeko builds this out of bright, rubbery house synths and a vocal chop that sounds like someone shouting the title down a hallway, and the three exclamation marks turn out to be accurate. It moves. The whole track has a restless, forward-leaning energy, nothing sitting still long enough to get comfortable, new little details flicking in and out of the mix every few bars. At 1:40 it drops into a half-time section that briefly lets you breathe before snapping back to full pace, and the contrast makes the return hit twice as hard. There’s a retro flavour to the synth patches too, a nod to the plastic-fantastic sound of late-nineties French touch without ever tipping into straight pastiche. For an NCS release aimed mostly at streamers and gaming montages, somebody clearly cared a good deal more than the brief required. It’s the kind of relentlessly upbeat track I’d normally find exhausting, and this one just got away with it. That hiccup in the bassline is still looping in my head and I’ve stopped fighting it.

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