Give LAST TIME about forty seconds before you decide anything, because it saves its best card for the drop. Milkoi turns up on NCS with something moodier and more electronic-leaning than the channel’s poppier fare, a track that spends its first half building a low, anxious tension you can feel in your chest. The vocal is sparse and processed, more suggestion than statement, floating over a beat that keeps threatening to break and refusing to. When it finally does break, the drop trades the expected big melody for something colder and more mechanical, a bass sound with actual teeth on it. That patience is what separates it from the pack: plenty of producers can write a drop, far fewer know how to make you desperate for it first. There’s a metallic percussion hit panning across the stereo field in the back half that I keep catching on headphones. Stick with it past the intro and it pays you back with interest.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.