What happens when three producers this big get in a room: do you get the best of each, or the cautious average of all three? Give You Love lands closer to the average. It is emotional-dubstep-by-numbers, a soaring wounded vocal in the breakdown and then a drop engineered by Excision to relocate your sinuses, both halves polished to a high shine. The problem is I have heard this exact arc a hundred times, and nothing here makes the hundred-and-first feel necessary. SLANDER’s melodic streak and Excision’s brute force should collide into something strange, and instead they just politely take turns, each one tidying up after the other. The drop is genuinely enormous, a proper detuned monster that will do real damage on a festival stack, no argument there. But I kept waiting for the moment where one of them did something the other two would never have signed off on alone, and it never came. All that firepower, aimed squarely at a target nobody needed hit again.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.