Particle - Coming Down

There’s a half-time section in the back third of Coming Down where the whole track slows its own heartbeat, and it’s the best decision on the record. Particle spends the first stretch building a fairly standard rolling DnB groove, pleasant enough, the kind of thing you nod along to without remembering later. Then it drops into this dragging, weighted breakdown that completely changes the temperature of the room, and I sat up the first time it happened. That’s the move that separates a track you file away from one you send to people. The bass design throughout is genuinely nasty, all grit and movement, never just parking on a note and coasting. The vocal sample — some pitched, wordless sigh — threads through the whole thing and gives it a melancholy that most tracks this heavy don’t bother reaching for. I keep coming back to how much is going on in the low end without it ever turning to mud, which is the part I keep noticing. It runs long, close to six minutes, and unusually for a DnB track I didn’t want it any shorter. This is the kind of thing that reminds me the genre still has range left in it, that it can be crushing and sad in the same breath. I’ve played it enough this week that my downstairs neighbour probably knows the drop by now. No apologies.

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