News / drum and bass
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1 min read
En:vy - Love Talk
Read more . . . →Some tracks just want you to feel good and refuse to apologise for it. Love Talk is one of them. En:vy deal in the sunlit, liquid end of drum and bass, the kind that sounds like the first properly warm day of the year, and this is them doing it as well as they ever have. The vocal hook is featherweight and impossibly catchy, the sort of thing you’ll catch yourself humming three hours later with no idea where it came from. The bassline rolls rather than punches, all rounded edges, and the whole thing floats at that specific liquid...
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1 min read
T & Sugah - The Rush
Read more . . . →The snare on “The Rush” cracks like someone breaking a plank over their knee, and once you notice it you can’t stop hearing it. T & Sugah have been quietly reliable in the melodic-DnB world for years, and this is them at full send — a euphoric, festival-sized drop that arrives at 1:22 and doesn’t apologise for being obvious. It’s not the most sophisticated thing UKF has put out this month, and it isn’t trying to be; the entire brief here seems to be “make people want to run through a wall,” and it delivers. The vocal is pitched up...
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Sudley, Loboski, ShockOne & Hanne Mjøen - Terminal
Read more . . . →Four names on one track usually spells committee, but “Terminal” somehow sounds like a single idea rather than four people negotiating. ShockOne is the veteran in the credits and you can hear his fingerprints on the sound design — that crisp, slightly metallic drum work — but it’s Hanne Mjøen’s vocal that gives the thing a spine. She sings the hook with a flat, almost bored cool that plays beautifully against how frantic the drop gets at 1:35. This is Monstercat doing what Monstercat does when it’s on: a big electronic drop with enough melodic weight that it doesn’t feel...
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1 min read
Camo & Krooked & Mefjus - Redemption (feat. Joe Killington)
Read more . . . →This is the drum and bass collab I didn’t know I’d been waiting for. Camo & Krooked bring the widescreen melody, Mefjus brings the engineering-degree bass design, and somehow the two halves don’t fight each other. They take turns. Redemption opens like a Camo & Krooked tune, all cinematic pads and Joe Killington’s voice doing that ache-y thing he does, and then Mefjus’s fingerprints show up in the drop, which is tighter and nastier than either act tends to go alone. The bass at the first drop has a metallic edge that could only be his. What gets me is...
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1 min read
Benny L & Cleveland Watkiss - Metaphors
Read more . . . →Benny L makes some of the hardest, most weaponised jump-up DnB going, all air-raid basslines and no mercy. Cleveland Watkiss is a jazz vocalist and one of the original jungle MCs, a proper piece of the music’s history. On paper they’ve got no business on the same record. On “Metaphors” that history and that horsepower actually meet: the vocal winds through the intro with real warmth before the bass drops in around 0:50 and turns the whole thing into a warehouse. What I love is that the bass doesn’t flatten the vocal, it converses with it. Watkiss floats over the...
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1 min read
Fred V & Ayah Marar - Daydreaming
Fred V reunites with Ayah Marar for 'Daydreaming,' and this liquid DnB heartbreaker will convert people who swear they hate DnB.Read more . . . →Get the tee →Support the blogIf you wear this and someone hugs you, that's a real friend. -
1 min read
P Money & Whiney - New Life
P Money chases a rolling Hospital Records beat on 'New Life' and grime meets DnB like they were always cousins. Pure forward motion.Read more . . . →Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument. -
1 min read
Photek - 30 Seconds Out
Read more . . . →Photek disappearing for years and then dropping something this surgical is exactly on brand for a man who once made drum and bass sound like a sniper cleaning his rifle. “30 Seconds Out” is all tension and negative space. The drums are mixed so dry and so precise you could count the individual hits, and there’s a stretch around 1:40 where he pulls almost everything out except a single tom pattern and lets it hang there long enough to make you nervous. Nobody builds pressure like this anymore. The whole scene got louder and busier while he was gone, and...
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1 min read
Koven - Heartbeat
Read more . . . →Koven make the kind of drum and bass that soundtracks the emotional climax of a film that doesn’t exist yet. “Heartbeat” is peak them: Katie Boyle’s vocal sitting high and clean over a bassline doing quiet devastation underneath. The drop doesn’t explode so much as bloom, and there’s a half-time section around 2:30 where the whole thing opens up like a window and you get a lungful of air. I usually roll my eyes at DnB this polished, but Koven earn it by writing actual songs rather than vehicles for a bass patch. The vocal melody in the second chorus...
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1 min read
Kanine - Wide Awake
Read more . . . →Kanine keeps quietly making some of the most physical DnB going and nobody’s giving him enough credit for it. “Wide Awake” opens on a vocal snippet that sounds ripped from a late-night phone call, then drops into a roller so clean you could eat off it. The bass isn’t the loudest thing here; it’s the swing, the way the second bar of every phrase drags a fraction and makes your head nod against your will. I put this on to get some writing done and managed exactly nothing because I kept air-drumming the break at 1:40. His stuff always sits...
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