It Should Be Us

Andy Stotts first work in three years, surprise-released in November of 2019 as a double EP with the promise of an album in 2020, is a partial return to the knackered house sound he stumbled upon during the early 2010s. While his astounding run of full-lengths throughout the decade included his takes on jungle, grime, post-punk, and mutant synth pop, It Should Be Us largely dials things back down to soot-encrusted skeletal rhythms running at sluggish tempos like theyre trying to race through quicksand. Sounding more off-the-cuff than the majestic, immaculately crafted vocal-driven songs of Faith in Strangers or Too Many Voices, these are his most club-focused tracks in a while, but theyre as far from conventional as anything else hes released post-2010. Some of the most memorable cuts happen to be the ones with disembodied, scattered vocal samples, like the Coil-gone-post-dubstep Collapse or the broken euphoria of It Should Be Us, easily Stotts most club-friendly track in ages. Take is riddled with tape smudge and hollowed-out bass groans, and OL9, one of the EPs faster numbers, has a huge kick drum and gets pretty hot and shuffly. Ballroom is a sort of lopsided grime/footwork hybrid, with cruddy drum machines battering a flickering vocal sample (possibly saying Dont be sad) which keeps changing its pitch, while a dying arcade machine pings out a bassline. Stotts music is disorienting and sickly, but its also undeniably full of life, and It Should Be Us is just as fascinating as one would expect. ~ Paul Simpson