Your EDM Premiere: Sweetpea and Iris Bring Some ‘Fresh Cutz’ Into 2023 [Sofa Sound]

The wonderful thing about DLR’s Sofa Sound imprint and its A&R is that, identical to DLR himself, there’s at all times a way of enjoyable and funk constructed into each monitor. From the discharge artwork to the sound design to even the deepest, heaviest tracks nonetheless being a little bit of a bop, there’s a playfulness there that provides Sofa its mass attraction whereas nonetheless being technically spot-on. With their new collab EP Fresh Cutz due out tomorrow, January 25, Iris and Sweetpea have greater than embraced that enjoyable facet to beatmaking with a group of quick, funky rollers.

Most US heads will know Iris from her work with Quadrant. Together they’ve been one of many few US acts to trapse the hazardous atlantic connection and earn high billing with UK labels, releasing on the likes of Delta9, C4C, CIA Dispatch, Shogun and lots of extra over their lengthy tenure within the scene. Iris has additionally achieved her justifiable share of solo work however appears to be actually going for it within the final couple years, with one of many first branch-out tracks, appropriately sufficient, being with Sweetpea on DLR’s Sofa King Sick Chapter 3 compilation.

Sweetpea is one other D&B lifer who’s been making tracks since 2016 and has rapidly develop into a mainstay of Sofa Sound and Bcee’s Spearhead Records whereas additionally releasing tracks on Dispatch, Hospital and Addictive Behaviour. She’s additionally a part of the highly effective London girls’s collective, EQ50, who work to provide equal alternative to all artists in drum & bass. Known to neuro with the grimiest of them but additionally capable of make a killer vocal monitor, if you happen to’re a stateside head who hasn’t heard Sweetpea’s discography but, it’s time to get to Googling.

Iris, Sweetpea and DLR have chosen a cool format for Fresh Cutz: there are two true collab monitor the place each the artists labored on them and two the place it’s simply Iris or Sweetpea. This is enjoyable for the tech heads as a result of audiences can actually hear every artist’s particular person fashion proper alongside their fused work. It makes for an fascinating examine in how collabs are made. The collab tracks are the title monitor, a jumpy throwback of a deep curler that’s as quick as is it minimal on sound design and final week’s teaser monitor, “DFS.” “DFS” has an analogous snare-focused, fast-moving beat construction however lands extra on the darkish than the deep facet, particularly when the tempo modifications to a quick model of dubstep on the break.

EP opener “Not Even a Big Up” is Iris’s monitor. Continuing the rolling drum motif, this monitor nonetheless has the throwback cachet each she and Sweetpea love, however Iris have her monitor an additional, oh-so-subtle injection of rave within the sound design. It’s only a trace of musicality and some mid-90s samples, nevertheless it makes a distinction and carves out Iris’s personal fashion whereas staying true to the theme of the EP.

Similarly, Sweetpea’s “Duck Funk,” our YEDM premiere in the present day, is fast and tom-forward in its rolling drums a’la the remainder of the EP nevertheless it’s received a great deal of spooky, virtually ominous sound design. A canned, low-reg synth does a number of the work on this monitor: it carries the music whereas connecting to the drums, after which drops again within the break to the background, the place it turns into much more canned and echoey.

This break bit might technically be probably the most fascinating a part of the monitor as a result of that synth by no means leaves and is rarely actually within the background. The type it takes within the afore-mentioned break makes it sound prefer it’s being performed at a membership behind closed doorways. It grows fainter, however you by no means cease being attentive to it. It comes again in through a swooping sinewave that brings the listener into the rave with it. The magic of rave is encapsulated in that second; we’ve all felt it, nevertheless it’s inconceivable to explain. Luckily, Sweetpea caught it in a mixdown for us.

It’s clear that Sweetpea and Iris have a shared imaginative and prescient for his or her work, and in Fresh Cutz it intersects at rolling drums, minimal sound design, deep synths and, after all, rave. Bring within the enjoyable and funky facet with Sofa Sound, and this EP is as really recent as it’s timeless.

Fresh Cutz drops tomorrow, January 25 on Sofa Sound. Click right here to pre-order or pre-save.