Picks Of The Week (06.11.21

1. Various Artists - 5 Year Anniversatea Part 2 (High Tea Music Presents) 💎 [High Tea Music]

Recommended if you like: T & Sugah, NCT, Mountain

At this point I'm like a walking advertisement board for High Tea Music.

Honestly, since I started doing these reviews pretty much all releases coming out of the still relatively new dutch label end up here. They always manage to hit that perfect blend of established artists and newcomers, which are also perfectly distributed on the axis between beautiful liquid and cheesy dancefloor. High Tea is also consistently giving some of my favourite producers in that subgenre a platform to shine on and I'm eternally grateful for that. Don't worry, I'll namedrop them further down, just don't want to spoil anything yet! So mysterious. Especially when I already hyped most of them up in a previous review. Such an enigma this review person!

As you can tell from the title, T & Sugah are now continuing their celebration of five years of existe(a)nce (yes, I recycled that tea pun, sue me!). This time they brought together even more artists for a total of 17 excellent tracks. You know the drill, favourites first, summaries after. Ah yes, before I forget: Since most of the artists on this album, and in this selection of favourites, are extremely underrated, I'll declare this my Hidden Gem Of The Week™! Alright, let's go!

My first pick comes from a returning champion: Houndeye! In case you don't remember, the drum & bass project of Felipe Pereira, formerly known as part of mostly Dubstep duo City 17, actually had its debut on the first part of this Anniversatea compilation two-parter! What you might not know, however, is that Houndeye put out a banging bootleg of Lil Nas X - Montero in between these two official releases. Seriously, go check that one out, it's insane. I can't stress it enough. Anyway, back to the main topic here: His new track Night City! Unlike the very floaty atmosphere-driven debut Goodbye For Now, this new one leans way more into banging dancefloor, "makes me jump out of my chair" territory. Or should I say, chai-r? It might not bring me to tears like its precessor, but it has that Tech House (?!) inspired flair to it that some of the first few big Dimension tracks had and that I've been missing a lot lately. If this track came on at a rave I'd put my head down and start skanking wildly until my feet hurt. Another bonus: it's extremely fun to mix with, nearly everything I tried to mix it with kind of just.. worked. That has to count for something too! In short, Houndeye keeps smashing and proves once again that why he is One To Watch™.

Rext up, wait, Next up is another artist I've mentioned a few times here: Rex Hooligan! Ever since the Switzerland-based producer from Estonia started appearing on the DnB scene in 2020, I've been a huge fan. One could say I'm a Rex Hooli-fan. I'm not even exaggerating when I say his regular appearances on them are one of the main reasons why I always look forward to these compilations. I know nobody uses last.fm, but I just checked and I'm responsible for 1/10 of all his scrobbles on there. Maybe it's because I'm one of the ten people still using last.fm, but whatever, point is, his stuff is awesome! He just always manages to hit that bright, uplifting, cheery vibe perfectly. His new track Everything is no Rex-ception (not sorry about this one)! It is everything I wanted in a new Rex Hooligan track. Bad puns aside, I really do absolutely love this new one by him. Not only is the vocal he chose catchy as hell, the production is just such a throwback to early 2010s dancefloor that I can't help but smile every single time I listen to it. I honestly hope he never stops doing this, I can never get enough of it.

My third pick from this great album comes straight out of Mannheim, Germany and is by someone I've been dying to feature here for a while now: Blooom! Brief history lesson: Blooom started his producer journey with his Electro House/Dubstep alias i'Maextro way back in 2014, before rebranding to his more easily rememberable, less-likely-to-be sued-by-Apple current name around 2016. His first release as Blooom, his Evolve EP on Daily Earfood, immediately made clear what you can expect from this project: pretty much anything and everything, especially genre-wise. The only thing that is kind of certain is this Fox Stevenson-y happy-go-lucky attitude in his music, but even that is injected with so many of his very own quirks and fun details that you can pretty much instantly recognize a Blooom track if you're even just vaguely familiar with him. The production quality is literally always off the charts.

His first Drum & Bass production, What's Wrong on that very same EP, is the perfect example of the delightful madness I'm trying to describe here. After this debut release, he went on to release excellent track after excellent track on huge labels like Liquicity (I love Rush so much), NoCopyrightSounds and even Monstercat, after winning Koven's remix competition for their track Gold! Not to forget: last year he was also part of High Tea's second Caffeine Rush compilation, in other words, this isn't his first rodeo on the label either. Considering all this, especially his streaming numbers, it's probably a bit misleading to say he's unknown or anything, but I'd still say he's very very much underrated. Dude could be the most famous producer of the DnB scene and I'd probably still say he's underrated.

So let's talk about this new track of his then! Let's just say Patience is probably the most unique track you'll hear this year. Blooom wastes no time on this one and lets the at first slow but then very quickly accelerating ticking clock 3 note scale take us right into the drop, where we're hit with the warm embrace of Blooom's beautiful basses. The always forward-marching time's arrow is only interrupted by some insane synths sharply cutting through everything every now and then. Then there's the great background strings flairing up occasionally. Oh and of course: the random coughing! In the little masterfully executed pause half-way through the drop we're introduced to another synth melody that just oozes fun, effortlessly bouncing atop the also newly added soothing blanket of atmospheric background synths. We're even treated to a fun little half-time version of the drop! This track a masterclass of production and just all-around amazing.

We're reaching some pretty long lengths already here, but I want to mention one more track in a little bit more detail: You Make Me Feel, the largest producer teamup in DnB history. Or should I say tea-m up? For this anthem of a tune none other than, inhales deeply, Dossa & Locuzzed, T & Sugah, NCT, VovKING, Mountain, Blooom, Kasger, Phonetic, Rex Hooligan, Jake Robertz, Subsequent, ZAZU aaaand Quoone worked on the extraordinary production, on which Anna Simone contributed a most wonderful vocal performance. The best part is, even with a list as big as this, you can still kind of hear everyone's little additions/styles in the final work. Maybe not everyone's, but with the two different drops there's certainly enough differences all over the track that you can hear a lot of the specific influences here. However, even without the million artists gimmick, this is one hell of a great dancefloor track.

Okay, but that's not even close to everything. This album also got some more cheesiness by Cream Blade (featuring romi) and Kasger & Haszan & Overload, some more deep vibey things by man like Manta and Dim Bolt (featuring vocals from a V O E sample pack! Yay!), some beautiful liquid by the likes of Aperio (featuring Aleya Mae), L.A.O.S and M:FX, and some harder stuff by Quoone, Mountain, Native C & Flipnosis and Valyd.

High Tea continues on its magnificient streak of great compilation releases with an amazing second part of their 5 year anniversary series. Newcomers, veterans, lush liquid, cheesy melodies, banging beats, this one got it all! Hope the label continues well into the High Teanage years, and beyond.

Other liquid things from this week (don't worry, the dancefloor recommendations are coming further below):

SØL, Alec Primavera - I'll Be Ready (<3333)
Matt View - Be There / Come Clean
Heymac - Hamartia 💎
Tatora - Confessions EP
Technimatic - Everlasting EP
Mac Summer - Web Of Life
Peter Lix - Fade Away
AM94 - Patience 💎
Nymfo, Riya, Collette Warren - Patience
BCee - This Time Next Year LP

2. Lateral - Everything U Say 💎 [YANA Music]

Recommended if you like: Danny Byrd, Kove, Coastal

I'm kind of in a dancefloor mood this week, so why not talk a little about the Lateral boys? That's right, another Hidden Gem Of The Week™!

Lateral are a brand new Leicester-/London-based producer duo specialising in only the finest of the fine dancefloor tunage. Even though Ben and Patrick only launched this project earlier this year, they have been working together for ages. They have been introduced to each other by a mutual friend during school days and they've kept in touch together ever since. Back then it was mostly jamming together on their guitars or marveling at Patrick's drum machine beats, but over time they gravitated towards producing more and more electronic music together, even though they weren't quite sure where to set their focus yet. After school Patrick started studying Music Tech at Uni, Ben did other solo ventures, but the connection stayed intact and the two kept creating tunes.

One day, the two realised that Drum & Bass had exactly the fun dancy energy they were looking for and decided to focus their talents on exactly that. Pretty much right after they managed to move their studio from Ben's family home to his own house, lockdown hit. While that might sound unfortunate at first, it was actually perfect for them. This way, they had a lot of extra time to spend in the new studio and perfect their craft! They continued the grind until one faithful day, over Christmas time, they spotted Toronto Is Broken's impromptu feedback stream on Twitch. Rumours have it that there might have even been a wild me in the chat there. They sent in their track Do It, just to get some useful advice or maybe some nice words. However, Christian liked the track so much he said he'd love to release it on his very own label, YANA Music. And the rest is history!

Which brings us this week's new release by them, which is also their fourth track on YANA: Everything U Say! What a fun tune this one is. Not only is the vocal sample, as simplistic as it may be, extremely fun to sing along to, the way it is synced up with the oldschool rave stabs is also just a great nostalgic throwback to the Good Old Days™. It's not just nostalgia at work here though, we've also got punchy, weighty drums kicking our butts to the dancefloor, alongside a siren that lets you know the heat emitting from this tune has caused a fire somewhere in the club.

All in all, a cleanly produced fun nostalgia trip that makes me want to get up and dance already! If you enjoy Dancefloor and are looking to expand your catalogue, here's a good place to start.

Other dancefloor things from this week:

Polygon, Rose - All The Way (<33333)
Urbandawn - Fly Away
Supercurve - Boys
Freaks & Geeks - See It Thru
K Motionz - Infinite (Freedom)
Tobax, Sammie Hall - Breathe
Kursiva - Who I Am