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1 min read
Hyper Potions & Nokae - 1-2 Finish (feat. Nat James)
Read more . . . →How do you make speed house that doesn’t leave you exhausted? Hyper Potions and Nokae seem to have cracked it on 1-2 Finish, because this thing sprints and somehow stays fun the whole way. Hyper Potions built their name on that hyper-bright, Sonic-trailer sugar rush, and here they aim it at the 150-BPM speed house lane with Nat James on vocals holding it together. The tempo should be tiring and instead it’s giddy; the bassline bounces like it’s on a trampoline and the whole thing grins at you. Nat James keeps it human, an actual hook instead of just a...
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4 min read
This Week on coldplaysucks — Sept 6-13
Read more . . . →Forty-one tracks posted, a completely new top 10, and every artist who held a chart position last month got bounced. House led the volume, DnB kept pace, dubstep stayed heavy, and a trance track from June is somehow running the board as summer refuses to end. The Charts Full reset. Every track on last month’s chart dropped off and ten new entries took their places. Nobody held, nobody climbed — they all got replaced. TLM feat. Merely - Summer Jam — new on the chart and sitting at the top, three months after posting. Listen → Born On Road &...
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1 min read
Day 196 and a Tee Time
Read more . . . →It’s Day 196 of the war with Iran. Twenty-nine people have been executed in connection with anti-war protests. And the President of the United States is at a golf tournament in Doonbeg, Ireland — at a course he owns, the one that paid him $20 million last year. Five cargo planes full of armored Secret Service vehicles flew across the Atlantic so the man who started a war could sit in a hospitality tent and watch the Irish Open. Ireland footed a €20 million security bill for the visit. The Secret Service is booking rooms at his hotel, buying food...
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1 min read
HerShe & Bass Ventura - MAXIMUM SHELLA
Read more . . . →When did dubstep decide it wanted to be a soundsystem again? MAXIMUM SHELLA is HerShe and Bass Ventura going full dancehall-in-a-warehouse, all air horns and “shella” chants and a bassline that behaves less like a synth and more like a physical object being dragged across the floor. This is the fun end of the genre, the part that remembers dubstep grew out of reggae soundsystem culture and not out of a Skrillex tutorial. The drop is pure ignorant-in-a-good-way weight, the kind of thing that only fully makes sense at volume with other people losing it around you. There’s a moment...
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1 min read
Halogenix & JD. REID - Nakal (ft. Eka)
Read more . . . →Halogenix keeps making music that sounds like it’s dissolving. Ever since he stepped out of Ivy Lab and went solo, his stuff has drifted further from anything you’d call drum and bass into this smeared, half-lit club sound, and Nakal sits right in that fog with JD. REID. Eka’s vocal is chopped so fine it stops being words and becomes another synth, floating over a beat that keeps dropping bits of itself out. JD. REID’s fingerprints are all over the drum programming, which skitters and stutters in that broken UK way that never settles into a groove you can predict....
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1 min read
Q3 Results
Read more . . . →Growth was strong this quarter. The chart just needed somewhere to stand. The board is delighted. The numbers go up and to the right, and they are drawn in chalk on the one guy who actually made them. The shareholder letter will not mention him. In this picture he is furniture.
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1 min read
Etherwood & Grace Barton - Haven
Read more . . . →The moment Haven wins me over is the last chorus, where the whole track lifts a key and Grace Barton’s vocal opens all the way up. Etherwood has been the softest, most melodic corner of the Hospital Records roster for years, and Haven is him deep in his comfort zone, which in his case is a very good place to be. This is liquid drum and bass at its prettiest: rolling, unhurried drums, a bassline more felt than heard, and Barton’s voice sitting on top like sun through a window. It could easily tip into greeting-card territory and mostly doesn’t,...
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1 min read
Eli Brown - Damaged
Read more . . . →Eli Brown has turned into one of the most dependable names in peak-time techno, and Damaged is another brick in that wall. This is 2am music, dark and driving, built for a room with no windows and a fog machine working overtime. The bassline is a relentless, distorted throb that doesn’t let up for the full runtime, and over it Brown lays a vocal chopped and processed into something between a threat and a come-on. It’s the sound of the big warehouse techno that took over the UK these last few years, and Brown does it about as well as...
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1 min read
Fifteen Years of Para-Para-Paradise
Read more . . . →Fifteen years ago today, Coldplay released “Paradise.” It still sucks. The one where Chris Martin sings “para-para-paradise” on a loop like a GPS stuck recalculating. It was the second single off Mylo Xyloto — an album title that sounds like a prescription sedative and does roughly the same for the listener. The video featured a man in an elephant costume escaping a zoo and turning up at a concert in South Africa. That’s not a metaphor I’m reading into it. That is the literal plot. Fifty million YouTube views and counting, because apparently the bar was in hell and Coldplay...
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1 min read
DJs From Mars, JD Davis - Just Can't Get Enough
Read more . . . →Saw the title Just Can’t Get Enough and braced for either a Depeche Mode cover or a Black Eyed Peas one, and it turns out to be neither exactly. DJs From Mars, an Italian duo who built their name on chaotic mashup bootlegs, team up with vocalist JD Davis for a big, glossy dance record that borrows the famous title and hook energy and runs it through a festival main-stage filter. It’s shameless, all pumping kick and euphoric vocal and a drop engineered for maximum arms-in-the-air. Coming from a mashup act I half-expected something more unhinged and got something surprisingly...
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