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1 min read
ZKG - Right Here
Read more . . . →“Right Here” has more bite than the label it’s on usually gets credit for. NCS tracks get written off as gaming-stream wallpaper, and ZKG mostly ignores that ceiling: this is built around a catchy vocal hook, sure, but the drop earns its keep with a punchy, mid-tempo bass groove and a lead that snaps rather than soars. It’s clean, radio-ready electronic pop with just enough grit in the low end to keep it from floating away. The best bit is the second drop at 2:05, where a counter-melody sneaks in over the top and gives the whole thing a lift...
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1 min read
Koven - Heartbeat
Read more . . . →Koven make the kind of drum and bass that soundtracks the emotional climax of a film that doesn’t exist yet. “Heartbeat” is peak them: Katie Boyle’s vocal sitting high and clean over a bassline doing quiet devastation underneath. The drop doesn’t explode so much as bloom, and there’s a half-time section around 2:30 where the whole thing opens up like a window and you get a lungful of air. I usually roll my eyes at DnB this polished, but Koven earn it by writing actual songs rather than vehicles for a bass patch. The vocal melody in the second chorus...
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1 min read
Seven Lions - Asleep in the Garden of Infernal Stars
Seven Lions goes full fantasy-novel eclipse mode on this one. Menacing, cinematic, the melodic dubstep track you play in the dark.Read more . . . →Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
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There's an Avicii tribute at Tomorrowland this year and I'm not ready
Read more . . . →Quick heads up before the gates open: this year’s Tomorrowland includes an Avicii tribute, and if you were anywhere near dance music between 2011 and 2018 you already know why that lands hard. Tim Bergling more or less wrote the sound the mainstage still runs on, then he was gone at 28. The festival that helped build him is giving a whole moment back to him. Four tracks to have loaded before you’re standing in that field with everyone else. 1. Avicii - Levels The one that started it. An Etta James sample looped over a piano line so simple...
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1 min read
Kkriegerz - Waiting For You
Read more . . . →The vocal on “Waiting For You” is pitched up just enough to sound like it’s calling from the next room over, and that slightly uncanny quality is what pulls the whole track together. This is an NCS release, which usually means disposable background music for Twitch streams, and Kkriegerz mostly transcends the format by actually committing to a mood. It’s melodic bass with a real melancholy streak, the kind of track that manages to sound euphoric and a little heartbroken at once. The drop trades screaming synths for a supersaw lead that swells rather than stabs, and it hits harder...
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1 min read
Kanine - Wide Awake
Read more . . . →Kanine keeps quietly making some of the most physical DnB going and nobody’s giving him enough credit for it. “Wide Awake” opens on a vocal snippet that sounds ripped from a late-night phone call, then drops into a roller so clean you could eat off it. The bass isn’t the loudest thing here; it’s the swing, the way the second bar of every phrase drags a fraction and makes your head nod against your will. I put this on to get some writing done and managed exactly nothing because I kept air-drumming the break at 1:40. His stuff always sits...
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Joel Corry - Whisper
Read more . . . →Joel Corry is a producer I want to dislike on principle, and “Whisper” keeps ruining that plan. The man makes chart-house engineered in a lab for maximum radio penetration, and yet the hook here burrows in within one listen and refuses to leave. It’s built around a breathy vocal sample that gives the track its name, looped over a piano-house bounce that would sound at home in 1994 and on daytime radio tomorrow morning. There’s zero risk in it and I weirdly respect the sheer efficiency; every element is there to make you move, nothing is there by accident. The...
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1 min read
Tomorrowland is in Belgium and the locals still run the place
Read more . . . →Reminder that Tomorrowland happens in Boom, a Belgian town of about 18,000 that swells to festival-sized every July and then goes quiet again. The polite thing is to respect the home team, and Belgium’s dance roster punches so far above the country’s weight it’s almost unfair. Four locals worth your time, running from radio-friendly to genuinely frightening. 1. Lost Frequencies - Are You With Me Felix De Laet was still a teenager when this became the first Belgian track to top the UK singles chart. It’s a country sample turned into a sunset anthem, and it should be corny, but...
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400 Companies Begged His Trade Office for a Break. That's the Confession.
Read more . . . →Trump has spent his whole second term telling you tariffs are a tax on China, on Europe, on whoever the villain is that week — the bill lands on foreigners, never on you. That’s the load-bearing lie of the entire project. So here’s the part he’d rather you skip: when his trade office opened the floor for public comment on the newest round, more than 400 companies wrote in, and almost every one of them was begging to be let off the hook. Ford. The electrical manufacturers. The people who import cigars. Nobody writes a panicked letter asking to be...
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1 min read
Heirloom - Oh Don't Tell (Live from Bush Hall, London)
Read more . . . →A live band recording on Anjunadeep is the last thing I expected to be my favourite find this week, and yet here we are. “Oh Don’t Tell” was captured at Bush Hall in London and you can actually hear the room in it — the slight bloom on the vocal, the way the bass guitar breathes instead of loops. Heirloom sit in this hazy space between electronic and live indie where the drum machine and a real kit seem to be having a quiet conversation. The song itself is a slow-burn heartbreak thing, all restraint and held tension, and the...
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