Roundup, May #1

This week, there’s loads of variety on the menu, from happy hardcore to minimal and meditative downtempo. Take your pick! These are the tracks you need to hear. 

Alison Goldfrapp – Love Invention

For her debut solo album, dance music icon Alison Goldfrapp has been opting toward a euphoric, disco-house sound palette, and the title track from her forthcoming album is no exception. Her husky signature vocals slide across Love Invention’s velveteen drapes of synths and sparkling pads, backed by a chugging bass groove. Though there’s nothing particularly new for Goldfrapp here, it’s a solid homage to the sounds and scenes that have shaped her. 

Lil Texas – First Love

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that the divisive sound of happy hardcore can go off big time, particularly in the hands of someone as obnoxious as Lil Texas. First Love is as deranged as it gets, with Texas decaying the gabber jackhammering of happy hardcore to grating, ambiguous blips of white noise that sound a bit like a remix of the old internet dial up tone. It’s wild, unhinged, and an absolute riot. 

Boys Noize, Pussy Riot & Alice Glass – Chastity 

Producer Boys Noize links with radical feminist punk and leader of Pussy Riot, Nadya Tolokonnikova to create a rubbery, propulsive hi-NRG techno track that brilliantly ropes in Alice Glass to sing about making men submissive sex slaves. There’s a lot to take in here, from the cultural metanarrative of Glass together with Pussy Riot to Boys Noize’s hyped up production, but it’s the sly humor that’s simultaneously completely serious that makes Chastity achingly cool and seductively violent.

Olaf Dreijer & Mount. Sims – Hybrid Fruit

The latest from The Knife’s Olaf is less a track and more of a guided meditation of sorts. With a looped, cyclical structure and vague, ambiguous melodies, Hybrid Fruit is quite simply the sound of a repeated, regular time drum rhythm that opens into glowing washes of ambient synths and steel-drum accents. Primordial, shamanic, and utterly hypnotic, Hybrid Fruit is made for moments of inner reflection and cosmic exploration.