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1 min read
onte - halcyon
Read more . . . →Three plays in and I still cannot decide whether halcyon is genuinely moving or just very good at pretending, which is probably the most interesting thing about it. onte is an NCS artist, which means this is built to be dropped into a gaming montage or a creator’s video royalty-free, part of a catalogue engineered to be useful first and personal second. And yet halcyon has a real wistfulness to it, a melodic electronic track with a vocal cut and a drop that picks glow over aggression. The melody is strong enough that it would survive well outside the NCS...
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3 min read
Charlotte de Witte and the Techno Takeover
Charlotte de Witte didn't water techno down to make it huge. She went harder. How KNTXT, a relentless kick and zero confetti took over festivals.Read more . . . →Subscribe →Weekly digestSundays. One email. Zero ballads from white guys in beanies. -
1 min read
Standard Terms
Read more . . . →Gold records on the wall and the fine print on the floor below. A band of kids in leather jackets signing their first contract. It starts at the desk and does not stop at the desk, spilling off the edge, down the staircase, out the door, and presumably into the parking lot. The executive sits back with his hands together. He has read this document. Nobody with a skull tattoo and a first single reads the part about perpetuity. The gold records behind him belong to whoever signed the last scroll, and they are still hanging there, which is more...
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1 min read
QZB & Duskee - Colder At The Peak
Read more . . . →What does drum and bass sound like when the producers grew up on a mountain border instead of in a London basement? Colder, on this evidence, and I mean that as the compliment it is. QZB are a Swiss duo from around Basel who release through Critical Music, about the strongest quality stamp the genre has, and Colder At The Peak teams them with Duskee, one of the sharper MCs London has produced this decade. The track earns its title. There is a crispness to the production, a clean, almost clinical precision to the drum programming, alpine air where you...
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1 min read
Raphi - Keep It Movin'
Read more . . . →The vocal sample in Keep It Movin’, a chopped soul snippet looped under a four-on-the-floor kick, is lifted so cleanly from the disco-house playbook that I spent the first listen trying to place where I had heard it. Raphi clearly has range, because this sits miles from his punchier club stuff, reaching instead for a warm, funky, feel-good house groove aimed at the sunnier end of the floor. And it is fine. It is perfectly, professionally fine. The groove bounces, the vocal is catchy, the bassline struts along happily. But I keep waiting for a moment that never comes, a...
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1 min read
Ravekings & JSPH - Acid Fire
Read more . . . →Acid Fire is a big-room festival weapon that does precisely what Revealed Recordings weapons do, no more and no less. The label Hardwell built runs on a formula now, a very effective and very predictable one, and Ravekings and JSPH colour inside those lines with a steady hand. There is an acid line in here, a classic 303 squelch wound up and filtered for the drop, which is the one element giving the track any real character. Everything else is the familiar big-room playbook: a tense build, a beat drop, a massive lead synth engineered to detonate a festival crowd...
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1 min read
4K & Olivia Rose - letmego (VIP)
Read more . . . →The breathy one-word hook that carries letmego, nothing but the title sighed over and over, normally signals a track too in love with sounding pretty. This VIP goes back and roughs it up. Olivia Rose’s vocal still floats across the intro the way the melodic cut promised, but the drop underneath has been swapped out for something with grit in its teeth, a chewy detuned bass the first mix clearly sanded smooth. It lands in that melodic-dubstep pocket where the long build pays off into a half-time drop that actually hits instead of just shimmering. The ten seconds of restraint...
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3 min read
This Week on coldplaysucks: Oct 4 - Oct 11
Read more . . . →Sixty drops this week. House and drum and bass split the top of the pile between them, dubstep brought the heavy artillery, and somehow a pair of budget Bluetooth earbuds is sitting at number four on the monthly chart. I genuinely have no complaints. The Charts Isam Hadjih feat. Ormella - In My Dreams: holding the top for a 4th week, completely unmoved. Listen → TLM feat. Merely - Summer Jam: locked at two for 5 weeks running. Listen → Seven Lions & Kill The Noise - I Need: steady at three, 4 weeks and counting. Listen → Cheap Earbuds...
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1 min read
Five Thousand Dollars and a Pinky Swear
Read more . . . →Trump is promising every adult American $5,000 if Republicans win the midterms. He calls it a “dividend.” From what? Tariff revenue the Supreme Court already gutted. The man is writing checks on a closed account and calling it generosity. The math alone should end the conversation. Two hundred seventy million adults times five thousand dollars is $1.35 trillion. The entire federal education budget is about $80 billion. He doesn’t have the money. Congress hasn’t authorized it. There is no application and no timeline. It is a number on a Truth Social post, and that’s all it will ever be. But...
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1 min read
Retro Kid - Let It Out
Read more . . . →Caught this one on a late drive with nobody else on the road and it fit the mood so exactly it felt rigged. Let It Out turned up on MrSuicideSheep, the channel that has introduced half a generation to melodic electronic music through a sheep logo and zero hype, and it is a prime example of what that channel does best. It is bright, emotional, melodic electronic music built around a vocal and a drop that goes for uplift over impact. Retro Kid is not a name you will see on a festival poster, and that is sort of the...
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