Danny L Harle chews pop music into a sugary sludge. From the effervescent radio refractions of his early singles for PC Music to more recent tracks for Rina Sawayama and Charli XCX, he melts down familiar forms into their basest elements, delighting in the gross, glowing sounds that pool around the edges. Each track showcases his surreal sense of humor alongside his love for saccharine melodies and alien sound design, a philosophy that extends across mediums: His most iconic piece of merch is a T-shirt emblazoned with the words HUGE DANNY.
Harle’s new album applies that gleeful approach to another of his obsessions, dance music. Harlecore surveys the history of rave, sucking serotonin from its gleaming extremes: teeth-chattering trance, Thunderdome-worthy techno, psychedelic chill-out, and other chaotic club concoctions. But with Harle behind the decks, the record isn’t just a collection of nostalgic tracks. It’s also an “interactive club experience where the rave never ends,” an immersive digital venue where a resident DJ soundtracks each room. All sorts of experiments like this have popped up as physical clubs remain closed—Harle played a party in Minecraft last year—but Harlecore feels distinct. The album art features some of the avatars that Harle imagines playing these tracks: a towering lupine beast, a being of pure light, a cosmic jellyfish, and a diminutive cartoon character. The album’s fantastical absurdity highlights dance music’s unique power to separate revelers from the mundanity of the day-to-day, to build new worlds.
Credited on the release are DJ Danny, who makes celestial club cuts; DJ Ocean, who plays aqueous breakbeats; MC Boing, who raps with the jittery fervor of an energy drink mascot; and DJ Mayhem, a force of pure gabber chaos. The alter egos reflect the record’s collaborations (Ocean is Danny’s work with Caroline Polachek, the Mayhem tracks are with Hudson Mohawke, and the Boing cuts are with fellow PC Music alum Lil Data), but the concept also gives logic and narrative to the album’s absurd flurry of dance music subgenres. It’s rare to hear so many disparate sounds smashed together on one release, but you can imagine a party where all of these DJs could sit under one roof, united in the collective euphoria of a great night out.
Across the record, Harle works with uncharacteristic intensity. In the disorienting video for DJ Mayhem’s “Interlocked,” a crowd of ghostly revelers writhes in the shadow of a massive bipedal canine who’s destroying the venue with a giant glowing hammer—like if you’d hired one of the monsters from Rampage to DJ your party. Built around a chest-caving gabber beat, the track is fantastical, ecstatic, and overwhelming—just like any memorable rave. Even the more open-hearted and earnest tracks (like DJ Danny’s breakbeat trance ballad “On a Mountain” or the pastel happy hardcore of DJ Mayhem’s “Shining Stars”) are head-spinningly maximal, even by the standards of a producer with a reputation for turning pop music on its head.
The tracks credited to MC Boing most clearly exemplify Harlecore’s unrestrained energy. On “Boing Beat,” a pitched-up voice scream-raps about a night that “never, never, never ends.” It’s a little silly, especially the digital didgeridoo sounds that give the track its elastic beat, but the animated energy is undeniable. It plays like a rambling late-night conversation with friends in the smoking area of a club, optimistic and naive about the world outside its walls. “Everyone here is safe and nice,” he raps. “Makes me wanna have a great life.”
Harlecore takes its name from a real-life club night that Harle started in London in 2017, welcoming friends and DJs like A.G. Cook and Evian Christ to celebrate the maximal dance music of their youths with a crowd of like-minded partygoers. Harlecore, the record, is obviously an attempt to celebrate and preserve the energy of those nights, but it’s also a statement about the power of this kind of music. Harle makes repeated reference to the idea that Harlecore is a party that never stops, a testament to the stubborn resilience of ravers who—even in a time when clubs around the world are shuttered—have found ways to stay connected and keep dancing. When celebration seems impossible, music like Harlecore can ferry you to a world that’s brighter and more interesting than your own.
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