Jack U

Collaborations in stadium dance don’t get much bigger: Skrillex, the punk doyen of angular neon noise, and Diplo, the hipster in love with Jamaica, now conjoined as Jack U. This could potentially be amazing –imagine Diplo’s slobbering syncopation tricked out by Skrillex’s deranged sound design – but instead it’s outright derivative. Hudson Mohawke and Lunice, AKA TNGHT, must be laughing at the gall – their track Higher Ground is ripped off wholesale, from the high-pitched vocal to the juke-paced snare, the half-speed drop to HudMo’s dog-growl FX. Mimicking a two-year-old track isn’t a strong look for a couple of producers feted for their zeitgeist chiselling. Kiesza, meanwhile, makes a good stab at a diva top line, but inevitably her breakdown isn’t there to serve the track, but just create a bland alternative. Of course, Diplo has never made smooth grooves, and all the better for it, but everything from his mixes of favela rap and bassline house to his Major Lazer and M.I.A. production nevertheless had a through line to them. This, on the other hand, is prefab panels of voguish production, with laziness masquerading as puppyish energy.

Eric Copeland

Eric Copeland is a founding member of Black Dice, the psych-noise group who, when not making music that sounded like goblins bickering down a well, swerved into some of the most lethal grooves of the 00s. The bulbous Kokomo, the desiccated Roll Up, the staggeringly powerful Cone Toaster – this was 4/4 in the blur of panic, batting away madness. Copeland has recently been moving from that paranoia into something rather more happily funky though, on last year’s solo LP Joke in the Hole – and now goes one further with a brilliant EP on L.I.E.S. out this week. Streamable track Uncle Sam’s Blues begins with an Afro-disco bassline that soon has chanting hordes clambering onto it, making it even more discombobulated. The madness is compounded with a rampant Moroder synth arpeggio that galumphs through the rest of the noise, resulting in utter chaos – and one of the most uplifting tracks of the year.

Lukid

Where Copeland loosens up your mind, Lukid lets the bad thoughts creep in, and his new track Nine is sheer dread. A needling, wind-whipped synth line repeats over and over at different octaves, while the drum programming rumbles underneath, a half-time snare cutting through the mess to switch it up into a hip-hop beat. Like Evian Christ or Arca (see below), Lukid feels the latent chilliness of trap and grime and allows it to seep into his bones, walking those styles through apocalypse and into uncertainty. Its video from Nic Hamilton uses his mode of bright but moody pantones. Equally arresting is his brand new work for James Hoff, featured in this column last month.

Arca

This is the first track to have been released from Arca’s debut album, which is highly anticipated in the wake of production for Kanye West and FKA twigs. Like Lukid, he draws on grime, particularly the “sino-grime” style that used corny Orientalism and mournful Asian chord progressions. Thievery is one of the most driving cuts on the record, with a melody that yearns as it glumly rides a dancehall beat. Without giving too much away ahead of its 3 November release, the rest is as compellingly scatterbrained as you’d hope, with its fingertips reaching for and sometimes touching coherence. It’s the building materials of J-pop, trap and R&B. Don’t miss it.

Extreme Precautions

Extreme Precautions is angry, heavy, lunk-headed and anthemic. This is a side project from Paul Régimbeau, best known as Monokopf, who trades in masses of black clouds punctuated by bursts of lightning – and now it gets even more forbidding. He uses grindcore’s “blast beat” to evoke the steady cruelty of automatic weapons, shredding the sheets of noise and analogue synth draped across the tracks on his self-titled mini-album, which is 22 minutes long and was made in just one week. In it you can hear the military-industrial might of Dominic Fernow’s various projects, the seething mood swings of Alec Empire, and the dancefloor malevolence of Laurent Garnier’s Sound of the Big Babou – perfect for not so much cleansing the palate as scouring it.