Makoto, Gabriella Bongo, PVC & Blocksberg - Better Days

This one made the whole afternoon feel about ten degrees warmer. “Better Days” gathers Makoto, Gabriella Bongo, PVC and Blocksberg into a piece of soulful liquid dnb that sounds less produced than grown. Makoto has been making music this warm since before half the current scene owned a laptop, and you can hear that lived-in quality in every bar, the ease of someone with nothing left to prove. Gabriella Bongo’s vocal is the heart of it, soulful without a scrap of showing off, riding these breaks like she’s been singing over them her whole life. The drums roll with a genuine live-drummer swing, brushed and loose where a lot of liquid goes clinical and quantized. At 2:05 the low end opens into this deep, buttery sub-bass you feel in your ribs first, and it never once tips into aggression, just holds the whole thing up from below. There’s real instrumentation woven through, keys and what sounds like a live bass guitar somewhere in the mix, giving it a jazz-adjacent looseness most dnb can’t fake. This is grown-up dance music, the kind that works at a festival at sunrise and just as well in your kitchen on a slow Sunday. Warmth done this well is genuinely rare, and it’s the last thing you can fake your way through. Makoto has carried this exact sound for two decades without losing a step, which the newer names would do well to notice. I’ve had it on three times writing this.

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