If festival-label dance music makes you wince on reflex, Take Me Higher earns itself a four-minute exception. Matt Dybal and Alan Krevo build a progressive-leaning dance track with an actual arc, a melody that earns its lift across a long patient build before it ever opens all the way up. The vocal does the heavy lifting, a title phrase sung with enough conviction to carry the euphoria past the point where this stuff usually curdles into cheese. The restraint is the whole reason it works, the producers trusting a slow runway and flatly refusing to mash the big-room button at the first chance they get. By the time the payoff finally lands you have genuinely earned it, and the release hits all the harder for the wait you put in. It is disarmingly sincere and completely committed to the feeling, which is the most endearing thing a track like this is allowed to be. Proof the festival-facing end of dance music can still move you, once you get past the logo stamped on the sleeve. I have had it on repeat all afternoon.
Not the first time Matt Dybal, Alan Krevo has shown up here: Castor & Pollux, Alan Krevo - Rush