There are many ways to deconstruct club music. On Bristol label Illegal Data, releases might take explosive approaches to scary (Ship Sket) and whimsical (Mun Sing) extremes. More recently, the same label finds Stolen Velour, Floco and Aria SL filling the club chest-high with liquid: you hear elements sink, dissolve, or float past serenely on the surface.
Formation and Sound
The trio began as housemates in south east London, where sounds bleeding into one another was less a creative choice, and more a reality of housesharing. To create their sound, they pooled their ideas as producers, before adding their individual touches: Floco's violin, Aria SL's bel canto vocals and Stolen Velour's clubbier production chops. Their shapeshifting approach to live club music has meant an unusual spread of support slots: somehow, they complement both Jabu's dubby shoegaze, and the hardcore horror rave of Yya.
Debut Album Underlight
Following last year's ambient EP Holdfast, Underlight finds a fuller spectrum of movement without breaking their carefully created atmosphere. Lead single Caught Myself bobs between sunken drawls and airy, keening vocalisations, like a swimmer in a cycle of submerging and reappearing. The trip-hop of Moment wobbles and pulses. Transfigured moments of busier club styles – amapiano, gqom – appear on I Want and Loch.
Underlight's strength is the balance between these states of immersion. Cutscene, at the LP's midpoint, is a formless, full-body plunge, followed immediately by a cover: a refreshingly clean take on Lilium, the Puccini-like main theme from Japanese manga series Elfen Lied. From this high, the vocal line tumbles ever downwards, and the process of immersion begins again.
This Week's Best New Tracks
Radie Peat – Still I Love Him The Lankum member's solo debut is a song of eternal loving devotion – but the narrator's lover “knocks me about”. This sadness and horror is carried like a current of icy water through the warm, lovely arrangement. (BBT)
Biita Houdei – The Ground Here Hard to do the Laurel Canyon thing and not just ape the greats: Houdei channels Joni's open-hearted “chords of inquiry” but powers this acoustic sunbeam with her own appealingly rangy energy. (LS)
Kelela and PinkPantheress – The Bridge Kelela effortlessly brings luxury to everything she does; the surprise here is the usually cheeky PinkPantheress harmonising gorgeously on a story of a crush so overwhelming, this aqueous ballad sounds drowned by it. (LS)
RenzNiro – Save Me Over a drill-leaning beat with snares flitting past bass rumbles that lurk in the shadows, the Manchester rapper-producer recites self-worth mantras – just one highlight from world-building mixtape No Weapon Shall Prosper. (BBT)
Gilla Band – Placeholder Some of the Irish band's most diabolical work yet: an arid, sucking riff – catchy to the point of torment – coils around Dara Kiely's vocals before a frenzied constriction and manic, whacked-out high. (LS)
Edgar – Sígueme From the Oakland-and-Guadalajara musician's new album Pavor, this is a Spanish-language cover of Amanda Lear's Italo disco classic Follow Me, glittering like a black mirrorball in a goth club. (BBT)
Slow Pulp – Not for Nothing There's something of Bonnie Raitt's 90s heartbreakers to this piano-driven ballad from the Chicago band, as Emily Massey sings of the gulf between someone and their ex who has already moved on. (BBT)
