I had this on walking home in the cold last night and a completely ordinary street turned into the closing scene of a film I will never get to see. Sleep Forever pairs the Sota and Circadian production team with Deaf Havana, an actual rock band, and the collision lands far better than it has any right to. James Veck-Gilodi’s voice carries a real ache that most liquid drum and bass has to fake with a chopped-up sample, and here it just sits there whole and bruised over the rolling drums. The low end is warm rather than heavy, the kind that fills a space instead of punching through it. Liquicity built a whole genre out of this exact feeling and the best of it still gets me, the melancholy and the momentum tugging in opposite directions until you give up and feel both at once. It climbs to a chorus that could have come off a stadium record and somehow belongs over a 174bpm breakbeat anyway. Four minutes of beautiful, forward-moving sadness. I played it a second time before I even got my key in the door.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.