January
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1 min read
Tough Calls
Read more . . . →He’s been staring at the memo for three minutes. The yacht has not stopped. The document says Difficult Decisions in a font that costs more than your rent. He’s reading it the way a man reads a menu he already knows, on a boat he already owns, next to a drink he already poured. Somewhere onshore a building full of people are checking their emails every four minutes wondering if today is the day. The difficult decision is probably which floor to cut first, and he’ll make it between lunch and the second yacht in the background. The hard part...
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1 min read
Koven - sHow me heAVEn
Read more . . . →Katie Boyle’s voice cracks very slightly on the second chorus of Show Me Heaven, and that tiny imperfection is the best thing on the record. Koven have spent years perfecting festival-grade melodic drum and bass, the kind built for a field full of hands at dusk, and the risk with that polish is that it sands the humanity off. Here they leave the humanity in. The drop is enormous, a wall of supersaws and rolling breaks engineered to be heard from three fields over, but it is that small vocal fray that keeps pulling me back in. Max Rowat’s production...
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1 min read
angelrot & skrta - brb
Read more . . . →This sounds like the inside of a phone with seventeen tabs open, and I mean that as a compliment. angelrot and skrta make the kind of hyper-digital electronic that could only exist right now, all sugar-rush synths and vocals chopped into pixels, a track titled brb that’s somehow already gone before you catch it. It’s maximalist to the point of being a little unhinged, stacking ideas faster than you can register them, the sonic equivalent of a group chat at full tilt. Half the fun is how willing these two are to sound genuinely abrasive for a second if it...
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1 min read
KAAZE - Psychological (feat. CERES)
Read more . . . →KAAZE has found his voice, and her name is CERES. Psychological is the latest in what is quickly becoming a proper run of tracks between these two, big-room dance built around CERES’s enormous, reach-the-back-row topline. Where a lot of festival dance leans on a vocal as decoration, here she is the load-bearing wall, and the drop practically works for her instead of the other way around. KAAZE knows how to engineer a lift so it feels inevitable, and the hook has that same arms-open quality that makes a crowd sing before they have consciously learned the words. If I am...
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1 min read
1991 & Grace Barton - Stars Align
Read more . . . →Somewhere around the second chorus of Stars Align I stopped doing whatever I was doing and just let the thing roll over me. This is liquid drum and bass operating at the exact emotional frequency the style was invented for: Grace Barton’s vocal up front and aching, 1991’s drums rolling warm underneath, the whole thing built to land on a late train home more than a dancefloor. 1991 has spent years in London making this specific brand of melodic DnB without ever tipping into schmaltz, and Grace Barton hands him a topline with real spine and presence. The low end...
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1 min read
Two More Months and a Prayer
Read more . . . →China just extended its tariff truce with the US for another two months. That makes this the, what, fourth extension? Fifth? Nobody’s counting anymore because counting implies it might stop, and it won’t. The 24% tariff stays suspended until January, the 10% stays in place, and both sides get to pretend this rolling game of keep-away is a negotiation. It’s not. It’s two governments too proud to admit they broke international trade and too scared to finish breaking it. Meanwhile the people who actually buy things just keep paying more. The Section 301 exclusions expire today too, which means thousands...
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1 min read
Junior Jack, Mark Knight, James Hurr - Feelings
Read more . . . →There is a disco string stab in Feelings that sounds like it was lifted straight off a 1979 twelve-inch, and the moment it drops in, the whole track grins. Getting Junior Jack in a room with Mark Knight and James Hurr is a genuinely exciting prospect if you have any history with this music, Junior Jack being the man behind E Samba and Thrill Me, records that basically soundtracked a decade of European clubs. Feelings leans into that lineage hard. It is tech house with the disco left in, a filtered loop that struts rather than stomps, topped with a...
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1 min read
Record Quarter
Read more . . . →The water’s at his chest and the glass is still raised. Promotion material. Suit, tie, champagne flute, floodwater. He’s sitting in what used to be a corner office and is now a wading pool with a city view. The documents are floating. The shelves are half-submerged. He’s toasting anyway. This is the energy of every press release that reads “despite headwinds” and then announces a stock buyback. The building is filling with water and the man with the glass thinks he’s in a jacuzzi. Or he knows exactly what’s happening and he’s celebrating because his floor is the last one...
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1 min read
Juelz, Zedd - START THE DRAMA (T3MPURA Mashup)
Read more . . . →Somebody at a festival is going to lose their mind to this and have no idea it was never an official release. START THE DRAMA is a T3MPURA mashup welding Juelz’s trap muscle to a Zedd topline, the kind of unofficial edit that lives on DJ USB sticks long before it ever troubles a label. That is half the fun of it. Mashups like this are the folk music of the festival circuit, stitched together by someone who just wanted the two things they loved to exist in the same track and could not wait for permission. It should be...
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1 min read
Jay Sync - Midnight Blues
Read more . . . →First thing in a while that made me want to be in a sweaty room full of strangers. Midnight Blues is deep, slightly melancholy house, the sort that understands the dancefloor is also where people go to feel their feelings in public. Jay Sync builds it on a warm, rolling bassline and a vocal that floats somewhere between a hook and a sigh, and the whole thing has a blue-hour glow to it, lonely but not sad, the specific mood of the last hour before a club turns the lights up. There is a piano figure that comes in late...
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