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1 min read
ZEDS DEAD - RETURN TO THE RETURN (OF THE SPECTRUM OF INTERGALACTIC HAPPINESS): THE MOVIE
Read more . . . →With a title that long you’d better deliver, and somehow Zeds Dead do. This is the Canadian duo in full maximalist mode, a sprawling bass odyssey that lives up to its ridiculous name by cramming about four tracks’ worth of ideas into one runtime. It opens almost gently before detonating around 1:30 into the kind of grimy, wobbling bass workout that made their name a decade ago. What I love is that Zeds Dead have been doing this long enough to not care about trends, so this sounds gloriously out of step with whatever’s current, all old-school dubstep menace filtered...
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1 min read
Luude x 1991 - All We Do Is Dance
Read more . . . →The vocal on All We Do Is Dance is one of those loops that’s built to be inescapable — four words, pitched up, repeated until they stop meaning anything and start meaning everything. Luude made his name flipping pop into festival dnb and 1991 brings the actual jungle-adjacent chops, so this lands somewhere between a main-stage moment and something with genuine roll to it. The drop at 1:10 is enormous and slightly ridiculous, a reese bass that snarls under that helium hook, and I fully understand this is designed to make forty thousand people lose it at once. Normally that...
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1 min read
The dark Tomorrowland tents where you lose track of time
Read more . . . →Eight days out. There’s a whole side of Tomorrowland that trades drops for hypnosis. The melodic techno rooms, where the point is to lose track of time entirely and wander out at sunrise wondering what happened. Mind Against are on the bill this year, so here’s a run through the sound they came up in: 1. Mind Against - Walking Away The Afterlife aesthetic in one track: patient, cold, gorgeous. It takes almost three minutes to fully arrive and every second of that build earns it. This is 4am music, played to a room that has stopped checking the time....
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1 min read
DAIRE x Lightforce - Join Me
Read more . . . →Big, unashamed, hands-in-the-air trance is having a real moment again, and Join Me is a fine argument for why. DAIRE and Lightforce build this on a supersaw lead that could strip paint, but the melody is genuinely good: a rising phrase that resolves exactly where your ear wants it to, which is trance’s whole trick when it’s done right. The breakdown around 2:00 goes full emotional, all reverbed vocal and held chords, before the drop slams everything back to 138 and lets the kick carry the rest. This isn’t cerebral music and it isn’t trying to be; it’s engineered for...
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1 min read
Voltage - Music Is The Answer
Read more . . . →That vocal sample is older than half the people who’ll rave to this, and Voltage knows exactly what he’s doing dragging it back out. Music Is The Answer flips a house anthem hook into jump-up territory, and the contrast between the euphoric vocal and the gurning bassline underneath is the whole joke and the whole appeal. The drop at 1:05 is pure serotonin, the kind of obvious arms-up moment you’re not supposed to admit you love and love anyway. Voltage builds these things for a specific room at a specific hour, sweaty and past the point of caring, and it...
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1 min read
Poilievre Congratulated the Man Who Just Left Him
Read more . . . →Pierre Poilievre just watched a fifth MP walk out of his caucus, and his response was to thank the guy. Mark Carney appointed Conservative MP Richard Martel — a sitting member of Poilievre’s own team — to the Senate this week, and Martel took the red chair and left. Four Conservatives before him crossed the floor straight to the Liberals; Martel just got the seat handed to him by the Liberal prime minister instead. Poilievre reportedly found out minutes before it went public. Then he put out a statement wishing Martel well, hoping he’d “continue the fight for affordability, growing...
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1 min read
Da Hool - Meet Her at the Loveparade (Hex Cougar Remix)
Read more . . . →Meet Her at the Loveparade is a 1997 track older than a lot of the people who’ll hear this remix, and that riff, the dun, dun-dun-dun of it, is permanently lodged in dance music’s collective memory. Hex Cougar takes it somewhere Da Hool never imagined: a filthy half-time trap flip that treats the original melody as bait before the drop swallows it whole. The genius is leaving the riff almost untouched so the recognition lands clean, then detonating underneath it at 1:22 with a bass sound like a garbage truck compacting. It shouldn’t work. A 90s trance classic has no...
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1 min read
BROKN - Feel It
Read more . . . →What separates good trap from the wall of interchangeable stuff on channels like this? Usually one weird decision, and Feel It has a couple. BROKN builds the drop around a vocal sample pitched down until it sounds genuinely haunted, then pairs it with a bassline that swings instead of just thudding in place. The result at 1:18 has actual groove, which is rarer in this lane than it should be; most trap drops are content to sit there heavy and static, and this one moves its hips. There’s a snare roll going into the second drop that’s programmed with real...
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1 min read
501 ft. Belle Humble - HeadRush (beastboi. Remix)
Read more . . . →Belle Humble’s voice is the kind that can carry a whole track on its own, so handing it to beastboi. for a dubstep remix is a small act of violence I fully support. The original HeadRush was already a big vocal moment; this version keeps the top line intact through the first drop, lets you fall for it, then absolutely wrecks the second one with a low end that sounds like it’s chewing through the mix. What gets me is the restraint before the 2:10 switch. beastboi. holds the drop back a full bar longer than you expect, and that...
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1 min read
kiskadee, Jody Wisternoff & James Grant - Friendly Fire (feat. Ren Ocean)
Read more . . . →There’s a bassline in Friendly Fire that walks in on the offbeat and just refuses to leave, and it’s the reason this Anjunadeep cut lodged in my head for a full afternoon. Jody Wisternoff and James Grant have been steering this label’s melodic-house sound for years — Wisternoff was making records before half the Anjunadeep roster was born — and pairing them with kiskadee and Ren Ocean’s vocal gives the track a human warmth the genre sometimes forgets to include. It’s deep house that actually moves rather than just shimmering prettily in place, the groove doing real work under all...
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