Picks Of The Week (09.01.21

1. Zombie Cats, Smooth - Make Me Move / No More [Liquicity Records]

Recommended if you like: Wilkinson, Ekko & Sidetrack, Edlan

Welcome back to the Picks Of The Week! We've had a massive week full of bangers so let's not waste any more time and get right into it.

Everyone who knows my music taste even just a little bit knows I'm a massive fan of the Australian-German duo Zombie Cats. I was a fan of them when they were doing Neurofunk, but ever since they rebranded themselves and started producing whatever they felt like back in 2019 (for more on this check out my review of their debut album Mutation), I started eating everything they did up. You never know what you'll get with a Zombie Cats release, but you can count on it being 1) super well produced and 2) unique in some way.

They have been around since forever at this point, they know the genre inside and out. One day they'll release a smooth deep roller like Naus on Bad Taste, the next day you get unique dancefloor-neuro hybrids like Before My Eyes on Viper, then mesmerizing liquid like Falling on Galacy to straight-up banging neurofunk like their Need VIP on Eatbrain. And that was just a very small selection of their output from last year!

For this first release (of surely many) in 2021 the productive duo teamed up with a long-time friend: Luka Smooth! For those who don't know, the slovenian producer first started releasing around 2009 and has since then released on all kinds of different labels, from Viper to Eatbrain to Liquicity to RAM to literally countless others. He knows no genre boundaries and just hops from genre to genre whenever he so pleases. Together with his fellow slovenian mate Markoman he also produces banging neurofunk as Telekinesis on labels like Blackout, Bad Taste and, once again, Eatbrain.

Now when you take a closer look at some of the earlier Smooth releases on Drumwise and Citrus you'll see a familiar name on the feature: Rregula & Dementia, nowadays known as the Zombie Cats! A bit more than a decade after this fateful first feature, they team up again. Not for some banging neuro like you might expect with the names involved, no no, this one is released on Liquicity after all!

The A-side of this double single is the incredible Make Me Move featuring the regular Zombie Cats feature vocalist Sarah Pellicano. Man, what a tune this one is. There are always a few tracks each week that I really really like (I usually feature them here), but every now and then a track comes along that is just so damn good that I can't let go of it for weeks. Make Me Move is one of those. At the time of writing I'm at listen number 50, by the time this review is published it might hit 100. It embodies the Liquicity sound that I love so so much (who could have guessed that with my user flair) perfectly. Catchy vocals, amazing melodies that just make you move, danceable as hell. It has this "punchy melodic quality" to it that a lot of Smooth's Liquicity releases have and that I can't get enough of.

Speaking of vocals, I especially want to highlight Sarah Pellicano's awesome performance here. I've been a fan of Sarah's vocals forever, she just works so well with Ross & Rouven's productions. But recently she just keeps impressing me more and more. First Falling last year, now this. I love every single part of her vocal performance in this one, from the absolute hype intro to the break down the walls to make me moooove in the drop and everywhere else.

All the bits and pieces fit perfectly together to create one perfect dancefloor anthem. If I don't hear this at a future Liquicity festival I'm going to be sad.

While Make Me Move is my personal highlight, it would be criminal of me to disregard the second half of the single: No More. After the bombast of energy in the first half, this dreamy second part helps us all calm down a bit again. The atmosphere throughout No More is just simply soothing. Ironically, you can hear the Zombie Cats influence more than ever on this smooth liquid track. Maybe that's my fanboy-ism speaking, but all the little details and melodies that enter and leave throughout this ethereal experience remind me a lot of some of the more relaxed Mutation tracks, just even more dreamy. I love how all the reverberated sounds, be it the high-pitched vocal or the warm synths, come together to form one beautiful journey. The more I listen to it, the more I love it.

Special shoutout to YUE, who did the absolutely stunning artwork for this release!

All in all, already one of my favorite releases of this year!

Other dancefloor or liquid things that happend this week:

CamelPhat, LOWES - Easier (Sub Focus Remix) (beautiful remix)
Thomas Oliver - Friendly Fire (Danny Byrd Remix)
Echo Brown, KinKai - Affirmations
Dro Carey, RUE - Another Knot (Satl Remix)
DRS, HMD, Redeyes - Cinnamon Roses
Koherent - Endless Haze
Mindstate - Seven Satellites
Ex Duty - Confound

2. Hillsdom - Tell Me Your Lies / Stone Soul [ProgRAM]

Recommended if you like: Ownglow, Monrroe, Telomic

Up next, a great release by an artist I have to admit I only properly found out about this week: Hillsdom!

If you're like me a few days ago and just think "Huh, who?", let me introduce you to them. Hillsdom are Jake and Jack and as expected, this union of Jacks comes from the Union Jack country itself, the UK. I know one is called Jake, but the joke doesn't work with that. They are mates since year nine in school and have gained loads of experience in the musical world through playing in various different bands, playing various different genres, experimenting with everything under the sun. One of the most long-living ventures they tried out is drum and bass. At least since 2014 they started working on their first now-released tracks together, but it wasn't until 2017 that the first of them actually saw the light of day.

Their debut Lucid Dreams, featuring their college mate Novokane, was released in 2017 on UKF's label Pilot Records. It was all uphill(sdom) from there on. Soon after, you could find them on various Viper compilations, a Viper double single, on 2018's Technique summer compilation, a few times on Pilot again and on the 4th RAM Rave compilation. Safe to say, they're having quite a bit of success with the big labels.

Random pun that I can't seem to work into the text but that I don't want to throw away: With how often the two mention how much they like eating in interviews, it surprises me they haven't opened a restaurant named Grillsdom yet. Boo all you want, I'm happy.

For this new release they have returned to the big three lettered label with the flair for goat (or antelope?) horns: RAM! Well, not literally RAM, but their sister label ProgRAM! The first track on this lovely double single is the deep rolling Tell Me Your Lies, featuring Essexian singer Sayntei. If you are familiar with Hillsdom's style, you will notice this one has more of a darker feel to it than most of their other tracks. It is still unmistakenably Hillsdom though, from the way some of the deeper wubs sound to the autotune-y style of vocal used. Very neat little rolling track with loads of little details and variations throughout that keep you engaged the whole way through.

The second track of the single, Stone Soul, takes the whole thing up another notch on the chill vibe scale to a at least a solid 10. While there are still deep wubs hidden below the surface, the soulful vocals by Essexian singer Tabou combined with the tribal-ish vocal loops and the chilled-out minimal, almost lo-fi drums make this one of the most vibiest tunes I've heard recently. If you just want to chill out a bit to some drum and bass, this is a tune worth considering. One of the more interesting productions!

If any of this sounds interesting to you, give this release and all their other stuff a listen, they're definitely worth checking out!

Other deep and maybe even techy stuff that happened this week:

Ripple - Talking
John B, Data 3 - Up All Night (Data 3 Remix)
Terror, Imogen Story - Into You (Cyantific Remix)
Wingz - Mistrust
Various Artists - In Unity [Electric Hawk Records] (some of them are techy/weird dnb)
Trinist - Transmute

3. TNTKLZ - Breakup [Hanzom Music]

Recommended if you like: Tobax, Agressor Bunx

Do you really think I'd go a week without covering at least one Neuro release? Well, you thought wrong! Said neurofunk release comes from the Russian up-and-comer TNTKLZ and is, as you might have guessed, this week's Hidden Gem Of The Week™!

TNTKLZ, short for Tentacles, is the one of the newest faces of russian neurofunk, hailing from the beautiful Yekaterinburg. Even though the 18-year-old producer lists Noisia as one of his main inspirations, next to Agressor Bunx, Tobax and Enei, his name doesn't originate from the dutch trio's similarly titled track. It is a Half Life reference! You know, the tentacles that appear in the rocket propulsion test chamber. Fun fact: Half Life 1 is 4-5 years older than him. Fuck, I'm old.

The young prodigy started prodigying around 2016, with Drumstep and Dubstep being some of the first genres he experimented with. His first track as TNTKLZ was released on his SoundCloud n 2018, his first "proper" release followed in 2020 on Black Panther Recordings. Soon after, releases on Druid Records and Close2Death followed in the same year. And now, his first release of 2021 is being released on Hanzom Music!

Usually I would talk about the history of the label for things like this, but I've now featured them four times - I counted - I think you guys know them already by now. I could probably just rename this section "Hanzom Music Release Of The Week". Short version for the new readers and forgetful people: they are based in Cologne, they're still relatively new as they've only been releasing since 2019, they have had a killer 2020, they are one of my favorite labels for underground neurofunk. Please check them out!

But before you run away to listen to the whole back catalogue of Hanzom Music, let's talk about this newest one first.

The Breakup EP starts with a little banger called The Bash and boy does it ever set the scene. The first drop is divided into a three parts, each more hard-hitting than the one before. It starts off relatively slow with a raw, but bouncy melody going back and forth, before a separate horror-esque staccato melody creeps in and takes the track over for a bit. Very soon after the bouncy melody, now very much accelerated, comes up from below the surface again and causes one last bit of mayhem before the breakdown. In the second drop TNTKLZ takes the slow bouncy melody and turns it into a half-time slapper before going right back to the full speed mayhem witnessed in the first drop. Banger.

Next up we've got Stagger. A word that accurately describes how I walk after listening to this slapper of a track. Just like in The Bash, the Russian producer knows his variations and keeps alternating between different degrees of slappingness to keep us on our toes the whole way through. In this one the two main variations are "in-your-face kickpunch" and "fast AF staggering bass" that makes you feel like the place is being swarmed by monster insects.

The third track is Breakup, the title track of the EP! This track contains a voice sample from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and if that doesn't already tell you this is going to be a great track then I don't know anymore. The first half of Breakup we've got business as usual on this EP, in a good way. Big vibrating basses, formally known as Brr's, banging drums, a melody that makes you feel like a big monster is chasing you, perfect. The second drop, however, switches it up completely. Well, the first part of it. The rhythm switches from the usual full-speed to half-time and the drums become all syncopated, resulting in a wonky but strangely catchy rhythm before going back to the straight banging neuro we've become accustomed to.

Last but not least, we've got Creep Up. The final track of the EP takes us to a deeper, more cowbell-filled territory in the vast soundscapes of TNTKLZ. Still neurofunk, still quite a bit of brr, just slightly less energy. Quite an interesting track overall!

All in all, a great EP by a very promising new producer that I'll definitely keep an eye on in the future!

Other neurofunk moments this week:

Vowel - Dusk (Pitch Black) ("newschool" neuro, but still)
DJ Aki, Yellock, Audio - Code To Optimize
Kodin - Cyberpunk EP

Other hidden gems this week:

Yerite - Lonely Insomniac
Devilair - It All Ends
ZIONOV ND - Jetpack
Solsan - The Occult EP
CRSV - Starfall EP