The best part about monitoring underground music is that you start to spot trends pretty fast as they develop, and recently I’ve had my eye on a very specific one. By sheer chance this week we released an editorial talking about how bringing back clubbing could fix all the things, which while being a loaded statement is one I strongly believe in. To boil that whole article down to a single sentence, the last time the world was this broke we all went clubbing to pretend we weren’t all that broke, so now when once again there’s no shot in hell any of us can afford a house, I’m getting to slowly observe a resurgence of the music that made that period in time so iconic, but with a modern twist.

Darling I Dreamt’s What You Want fits this bill to a tee. It’s a deeply textured, ever morphing experience with some absolute top notch sound design, yet an oddly familiar feeling. The way it immediately swells in with cold industrial stabs and a warmly volatile synth bass is wonderfully dystopian, setting the tone for the entire songs constantly moving sound choices and effects. It’s fascinating because this song is so distinctly modern and forward thinking in it’s sound choices (to be frank it’s one of my favourite soundscapes of the year), but if you stripped it back, swapped the Serum wavetable synths to Nexus presets, and threw any 2000s pop singer on it, you could really convince me this song came out during the housing crisis. It’s a fascinating balance between the brutalist mixes and abrasive synth patches from the hyperpop world and the hyper-polished sound and feeling of this bygone era.

Nostalgia aside, there’s so much to love here. The vocal delivery from Darling I Dreamt is top tier with this wispy but bold feeling to it, paired to lyrics of betrayal and deceit. The layering here is really what does it, with the way the falsetto harmonies add this layer of airiness so the leads can focus on punching through the controlled chaos of the instrumental. When making these sorts of post-hyperpop fusion tracks there’s a very thin line you need to walk between coherent vocals and letting the instrumental truly speak, and I think with the way this song uses the silent moments in the bass to allow for vocal clarity, and then using it’s synth stabs to strip that clarity away is a unique approach to this philosophy that wraps the whole package nicely together.

There’s a lot to love about What You Want from it’s uniquely retro-modern instrumental to it’s particularly relatable subject matter, but above all else I just love that it’s doing something different. I talked in my Danny Brown article about how part of why I loved his project Stardust was it ultimately was flipping genre conventions on it’s head for a mass audience to see, and this song while not having the same level of audience on stand by is doing that same thing. It’s something completely fresh on top of a tried and true setup. It’s something that’s hard to do right, as traditionally pop culture is slow to move and hates change (often having viscerally negative reactions to these sorts of thought experiments), but this song I truly believe has the potential to take on that challenge of mass appeal while still being innovative and true to itself. So do the world at large a favour and send this one around to your friends, someone else will thank you for it.