7) RL Grime – Aurora
Even bass music is seeing a trend in favor of softer styles this festival season. RL Grime’s particular brand of trap music already bore the hallmarks of outside-the-box artistry through and through, but “Aurora” is the type of track that you could imagine spawning its own genre.
Ambient synth melodies meet pitch-shifted vocal cuts to yield a composition with almost unrivaled depth of concept. When you put it up against what RL Grime was releasing around this time last year, it’s apparent that he channeled some new and exciting influences during the creative process for “Aurora” – and it’s exciting to speculate as to what his upcoming releases will sound like in the next few months.
6) Kaskade And deadmau5 – Beneath With Me V.3
Kaskade and deadmau5 have been responsible for some of electronic music’s most celebrated collaborations as far back as eight years ago when they released “I Remember.” The progressive house icons with polar-opposite public personas clearly haven’t lost their touch, as the third version of their year-in-the-making track, “Beneath With Me,” mixes influences at the dance music forefront in a way that doesn’t come across as forced.
5) Dusky – Ingrid Is A Hybrid
Add London-based tech house duo Dusky to the list of artists who have succeeded in stepping outside of their creative comfort zone while still managing to turn out music worth listening to. In a subset of the dance music community in which putting out anything other than four-on-the-floor heaters is practically on par with sacrilege, somehow it’s hard to hate on what they’ve turned out for “Ingrid Is A Hybrid.”
If the track is any indicator of what’s to come from the remainder of Dusky’s upcoming album, Outer, synth-heavy breakbeats are not to be ruled out on any of the productions.
4) Lane 8 – Fingerprint
As much as their cult following has grown over the past couple of years, underground house and techno haven’t fallen out of the electronic music elite’s favor quite yet – and Lane 8’s “Fingerprint” is exactly the sort of track capable of catching the undercurrent.
A simple yet driving synth melody is underscored by a reverberant bass line in the seemingly eternal buildup of “Fingerprint.” In a manner that only a house music mastermind could pull off, Lane 8 reinforces each aural peak with seemingly arbitrary incidentals that contribute to the overall ambience of the arrangement.