aya
A DJ set from aya can be both thrilling and disorienting, a giddy maelstrom of jungle breaks, Dutch techno, UK funky, South African gqom, and who knows what else—plus edits of Charli XCX and “Call Me Maybe,” for good measure.… Read More
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Markus Guentner
The bell sound on “Concept of Credence,” from Markus Guentner’s new album Extropy, is just the bees’ knees. It comes out of nowhere, through a crack in the dense clouds of choir-synth-string-harmonics that form the bulk of the record, and… Read More
Eris Drew
Last year, when COVID-19 shut down the record stores and clubs and raves, along with the rest of the Western world, Eris Drew went to the woods. The past few years had been an epic come-up. In the 1990s, Drew… Read More
Helado Negro
For Roberto Carlos Lange, 2019 seemed to be the type of year that any songwriter hopes one day to see. After over 10 years of crafting introspective and alluringly amorphous songs as Helado Negro, among other projects, Lange pulled it… Read More
UNIIQU3
On the opening track of Heartbeats, Cherise Gary snarls, “I just want to fuck.” It’s exactly the sort of direct statement you’d expect from Jersey club, the “X-rated” dance music that Gary, aka UNIIQU3, first heard as a teenager in… Read More
Anthony Naples
Anthony Naples kicked off his debut album with a fakeout. The New York producer had made his name in 2012, at just 22, with an effervescent house jam that was ranked among the year’s best dance music, and he wasted… Read More
Disclosure
Throughout an 11-year career, English production duo Disclosure have never exactly tested dance music’s boundaries. Brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence are classicists: torchbearers for the vintage influences they pull from Chicago house, Detroit techno, and UK garage. But within that… Read More
Anz
For anyone who has ever slouched out of a nightclub in the inhospitable hours of the new day, wondering what on earth they were thinking, Manchester producer Anz’ All Hours offers ample justification that it was all worthwhile. Her debut… Read More
Soshi Takeda
There’s something profound about the uncanny, half-rendered graphics of 1990s technology. The same way space-age art from the 1950s sought to capture the unattainable dream of travelling through the stars in small flying cars, the eerily smooth computer models of… Read More
Yikii
Since 2017, the prolific Chinese artist Yikii has been releasing albums that have become increasingly robust and difficult to pin down. Initial records like ❀ [no pain] and Gentle Nightmare were sketch-like, with curious dabbles into glitch, ambient, industrial pop,… Read More