If you’ve written off melodic dubstep as festival-emoji music, this remix is a decent argument against you. LOCKBOX takes Said The Sky’s “Gotta Get To You” and does the thing good remixes do, which is find the sadness already hiding in the original and drag it to the front. Said The Sky has always worked the tear-in-your-eye end of American bass music, and where his version reaches for uplift, LOCKBOX pulls it somewhere darker and heavier. The drop trades the shimmer for grit, a bass that growls under the vocal instead of lifting it, and the contrast between the fragile topline and the ugly low end is the entire trick. It builds slowly, almost too slowly, before the floor drops out from under the whole thing. The vocal is left mostly intact, which is the right call, because it’s the human part this style usually buries under sixteen layers of synth. Play it back to back with the original and the remix is the one that actually aches.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.