“Like That” comes in low and mean, like a truck left idling outside your window at 3am, and I have not been able to stop playing it since this morning. Wingz has been one of the more reliable names in the UK bass world for a while now, moving between dubstep and drum and bass without ever sounding like he’s guessing, and this is him locked squarely in half-time menace. The bass patch does a thing where it bends downward at the end of every phrase, like the note itself is losing its nerve, and it drags the whole track into a lower gear each time. What sells it is the space around the drops. He leaves whole bars nearly empty, just a kick and a hiss of air, so when the weight lands the room feels like it got smaller. There’s a vocal snippet buried under the back half that I keep trying to catch and keep missing, some clipped syllable pitched into nonsense. Four plays in, the emptiness is my favourite part, which is a strange thing to say about a dubstep track built to punish a subwoofer. It wants volume and it wants a proper system, and it rewards both.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.