A tarana is a style of Hindustani classical singing built from rhythmic nonsense syllables, pure voice used as percussion, and naming a festival-sized dance track after it turns out to be a promise Matt Dybal and H2HB actually keep. Tarana folds a South Asian vocal motif into big-room progressive and does it with more taste than the genre usually bothers with, letting the melody breathe instead of bulldozing it with a drop. Dybal has been a steady presence on Revealed for a while now, and he clearly knows how to build the kind of huge, slow-rising tension a main stage demands. The vocal is the hook and the heartbeat here, chopped and reassembled so the syllables become their own rhythm section, which is exactly what a tarana does in the first place. When the drop lands it’s huge and bright and shameless, but that vocal keeps threading through it so the track never loses its centre. There’s a lot of faceless festival fodder in this corner of dance music and this is not that; it has an actual idea at its core. Big, melodic, and genuinely a bit moving once you clock what it’s doing.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.