With the rise of electronic dance music, the genre has become dominant in mainstream music today. Beyond EDM looks to move away from the dance floor and into your earbuds, bringing you artists and genres to calm your senses and vibes, because you can't always turn up.
This week is packed full of big releases from the pop spectrum of the world. Justin Bieber, Alessia Cara and One Direction all have albums expected to drop this Friday. Quietly releasing a single on a Monday isn’t too typical for any artist, but XXYYXX is not typical.
The Orlando native Marcel Everett has been an underground phenomenon crafting indie tinged hip-hop beats. Characterized by his repetitive usage of synths and samples, Everett prefers constantly varying percussion to evolve a song from start to finish instead of the traditional verse and chorus writing style.
Coming off a three-year hiatus of a proper album release, XXYYXX’s new single “Red” seems to mark movement toward releasing an album. This buzz is paired with his eponymous album being released on Spotify, creating a massive amount of buzz among the music nerds of the Internet.
As the song opens, the faint lingering of synths wave behind a singular key being stabbed into the beat as if the track has a heart beat. The tension of the song is eventually dropped for a bass filled paradise that simultaneously balances calm and confusion. As the off sound bass line alternates between a low, heady tone to its higher tone that comes off as questioning what is occurring around it, the feeling of drowning starts to rumble down from heart to your lungs. It's peaceful, but at no point in time is this bass line going to allow you to be comfortable. Everett wants listeners to shift around in their seats and pay attention to the music.
This tactic of the dominant tone within the record shifting between two notes is not a new thing for Everett as he wrote a similar movement into his breakout song "About You" which received a heavy dosage of fan promotion in crafting the song into multiple videos. The characteristic difference between the two is that the newest track doesn't have the sexy vibe that "About You" possessed. "Red" aims at being more philosophical in the discomfort it causes you.
This is fully characterized toward the end of the song when a slight break in the music comes to water droplets hitting the ground and the faint sampling of a monologue whispers through the background uttering, "Once the process begins, there's no end to this nightmare. And this is the corruption of humanity as we know it," to immediately blast back into where the song left off.
All of this paired with a blurred out vocals that only intensify the confusion and sadness that "Red" is wielding here. It's a juxtaposition between peace and confusion that ultimately leads to a stellar song and excitement for whatever XXYYXX brings to the table next.
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Beyond EDM: Nym's 'Convex' is just the right amount of chill
Reach the reporter at dloche@asu.edu or follow @DMLoche on Twitter.
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