NCS built an empire on tracks Twitch streamers can use without getting muted, and the knock on the label is that the music can feel a bit anonymous. The People is Reece Rosé quietly arguing against that. It’s a piano-house tune with an actual soul to it: the chords have that gospel-adjacent lift house has been borrowing from Chicago for forty years, and Rosé plays them like he means it. The vocal is a chopped, looped “the people” hook that should get annoying and instead becomes the thing you’re waiting for each time it circles back. The drop at 1:20 is pure hands-in-the-air stuff with no shame in its game. What surprises me is the low end. There’s a proper rolling bassline under the piano that most NCS uploads would have left thin. It’s uncomplicated joy engineered for a festival field, and I mean that as praise. Not everything needs to be deep. Some tracks just need to make five thousand people jump at the same time, and this is built to do precisely that.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.