Round-up Tracks: Years & Years, Drenge, & More

“There’s a scratch on your shoulder, crushes me like, crushes me like,” Olly Alexander keeps repeating endlessly on ‘Foundation,’ painfully turning over realisation in his head again and again. Years & Years have proven that they’re dab hands at crafting perfect progressions; parcels like ‘Desire’ and ‘King’ that build and spring into the shape of pop anthem transformers. With the emotion that charges their most love-lorn lyrics hung out to dry, and Alexander sounding at his most vulnerable, ‘Foundation,‘ is a different prospect, and lays bare the darkest, most brooding side of the band.

Despite his gruff Derbyshire tone, frontman Eoin Loveless winds up being quite the sass-pot on Drenge’s live lounge cover of Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’. The bass-line is raw and untamed, threatening to rush ahead and out of control at any moment. Any hint of jauntiness, meanwhile, is reigned back into an regimented, unforgiving new pace. Drenge pick up on the most angsty and restless strains of ‘Bad Blood’ and amp them up to the maximum setting.

Annie Clark and predictable are two words that don’t belong on the same planet. With that in mind, her latest feature spot with 90s rave giants The Chemical Brothers seems like the most obvious thing in the world, and she’s a creepy, haunting tannoy operator, watching carefully over the mathy, tumbling chaos. Bursting with maddened cackles, and whispers of “Got no husband, got no wife,” Clark brings a sinister, dangerous edge to The Chemical Brothers’ usual boundless euphoria.

It’s not every day that an artist announces their comeback with a “butt plug laser show” but then again Peaches is the very definition of a one-off. Though ‘Light In Places’ admittedly focuses on where the sun don’t shine - with Peaches reciting one of her trademark to-the-point lines in a robotic monotone - “all humans free at last, so much beauty coming out of my ass” - it’s really a song about liberation, at its heart. The synths grind and surge, jostling for space, and blunt-edged, trilling juts of percussion only fuel the fire further. The teaches of Peaches have returned, everyone. Brace yourselves.

Originally Shura’s ‘White Light’ was a hazy eyed and gooey armed stonker of a track, strutting out wide-eyed across the room. In Factory Floor’s remix, things unsurprisingly get a little more mechanical. Punctuated by howling klaxons, and sparse, robotic stabs of cowbell a bold and all-out, Gabe Gurnsey sweeps away all of the original’s footsteps, and the bare-bones re-imagining is fuelled by pingy, stamping beats instead. Shura’s vocals are spliced up into industrial jitters, the synths howl, and disco creeps back into the track in a totally different form.

Vibrantly decorated with his distinctive, soulful vocals, Petite Noir’s vibrant electronic music conjures up celebration and all-out parties out of thin air. Yannick Ilunga’s dubbed ‘Down’ - the first preview of his hotly awaited debut album ‘La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful’ - Noirwave. It’s music that represents a “new African aesthetic,” he says, and it’s about “seeing the positive in dark times”. He’s onto something great. There’s an effortless optimism surging through Petite Noir’s music, and ‘Down,’ with its playful humming foundations, and snappy, powering rhythms, is downright irresistible.

Tags: Drenge, Years & Years, Listen, Features