The title is a soundsystem greeting before it is a track name. “All massive” is what an MC shouts to the whole dance at once, every crew in the room, and Zen Selekta builds the track around exactly that communal feeling. This is dubstep with its roots showing, closer to the reggae and dub lineage the genre grew out of than to the brostep that borrowed its name for a few loud years. The bass is round and warm, built to move a whole room at once. It carries that half-step skank where the drums hang back and let the space ring out, and you can almost hear a rig too big for its venue straining the walls. There is a generosity to the weight of it that most modern bass music forgets to include. Zen Selekta has been flying the flag for this deeper, older strain of UK dubstep for years, and All Massive is a clean argument for why it keeps surviving the trends that try to bury it. It would sound enormous on a proper system and merely very good through earbuds, which is the right ratio for music built for the dance first and the playlist never. Find a dark room and real volume and it does the rest on its own.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.