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1 min read
Summer Died at a Good Time
Read more . . . →August 31st. The calendar doesn’t care about your playlist. Four records that made summer 2026 worth the sunburn and the regret, and none of them are by Coldplay. 1. Disclosure - The Sun Comes Up Tremendous Howard Lawrence singing lead on a Disclosure track for the first time, and it turns out the voice they’ve been hiring session vocalists to replace has been sitting in the other half of the studio. Cinematic pads and a bass drop that takes its time arriving. The mountainside video looks nothing like any Disclosure visual they’ve released before. The title is doing exactly the...
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1 min read
Matzan - Redesigned
Read more . . . →The bass in “Redesigned” doesn’t sound plucked or played so much as folded, a metallic origami noise that Matzan keeps refolding into new shapes across the drop. This is NCS on its more experimental footing, a house-leaning cut where the sound design is the whole hook and the melody is almost an afterthought hovering at the edges. At 1:12 the first drop lands with a rubbery, talking bass patch that answers itself call-and-response style, one note asking a question and the next one shrugging in reply. It’s clever without ever getting cold about it, which is the tightrope this designer-y...
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1 min read
Anaïs & Olivia Rose - Round Town
Anais and Olivia Rose stack harmonies until Round Town feels twice as wide as it should be. Play it for anyone who thinks dnb all sounds the same.Read more . . . →Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
1 min read
Your Laptop Is a National Security Threat Now
Read more . . . →The Trump administration is considering tariffs on every laptop, gaming console, and server that touches a semiconductor — which is all of them. The pitch is that this will bring chip manufacturing back to American soil. The reality is that a chip fab costs $20 billion, takes five years to build, and employs fewer people than a regional hospital. Your next laptop costs 20% more by Christmas. Intel gets a talking point for its investor call. You get the bill. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary who used to run a Wall Street brokerage, is the one designing this. His plan...
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1 min read
MaRLo - Give Me Tech Energy
Read more . . . →This one made me double-check the tracklist, because MaRLo mostly lives in the big uplifting-trance world and “Give Me Tech Energy” is him going harder and dirtier than his usual widescreen mode. The title is a thesis statement: it welds tech-trance drive to a nasty, tunneling bassline that owes more to a blacked-out warehouse than a festival main stage. At 1:35 the drop kicks in with a relentless, rolling low end and a single pitched vocal stab barking the title at you like an order you’d be foolish to ignore. There’s very little melody here by MaRLo standards; it’s all...
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1 min read
Lost Sky, Chris Linton - Heaven & Hell
Read more . . . →NCS tracks carry a reputation for being wallpaper behind gaming montages, and Lost Sky spent years being the exception people pointed to when they wanted to argue the label was more than that. “Heaven & Hell” keeps the argument going. Chris Linton sings it with more grit than the copyright-free lane usually attracts, a slightly frayed edge on the top notes that sells the push-pull the title is promising, so the whole thing feels lived-in rather than session-perfect. Lost Sky builds around him with that clean, melodic drop-pop that made “Fearless” a hundred-million-play monster, except this one has a darker...
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1 min read
Per My Last Email
Read more . . . →He followed up. Twice. Then he rested.
Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument. -
1 min read
Doctor P - Shots
Doctor P's Shots proves the man still builds a drop like he's showing off at a house party. Fifteen years in and your neck still won't forgive him.Read more . . . →Get the tee →Support the blogThree words. One opinion. Cotton. -
3 min read
This Week on coldplaysucks — Aug 23-30
Read more . . . →Forty-nine tracks crossed the blog this week. DnB and house tied for the biggest pile, dubstep brought the property damage, and trance arrived with six records and zero shame. End of August, apparently everybody had something to say. Track of the Week BOP - Rumination I’ve gone back to this one more than anything else, and it isn’t close. Deep liquid dnb built from a warm pad, a lonely piano figure, and a rolling break that breathes more than it hits. The gaps between the notes are where the whole track lives. I’ve had it on for late-night writing three...
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1 min read
They Broke the Complaint Box
Read more . . . →The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2-1 on Tuesday to strip federal employees of their right to a hearing when they file a discrimination complaint. The agency whose one job is to hear you when your boss discriminates against you just voted to stop hearing you. Chair Andrea Lucas called the complaint process “susceptible to abuse.” The abuse she’s referring to is federal workers — prison guards who got groped, FBI agents who got passed over for being the wrong color — asking for their case to be heard by an actual judge. That’s the abuse. People using the system...
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