onte - halcyon

Three plays in and I still cannot decide whether halcyon is genuinely moving or just very good at pretending, which is probably the most interesting thing about it. onte is an NCS artist, which means this is built to be dropped into a gaming montage or a creator’s video royalty-free, part of a catalogue engineered to be useful first and personal second. And yet halcyon has a real wistfulness to it, a melodic electronic track with a vocal cut and a drop that picks glow over aggression. The melody is strong enough that it would survive well outside the NCS machine, which is more than you can say for most of that catalogue. There is a melancholy running under the brightness that keeps it from feeling like pure functional filler. I put it on expecting background music and ended up actually looking up from my phone. The NCS model usually flattens the personality out of a track. Somehow this one held onto a little of its own. Worth more than its royalty-free purpose suggests.

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