Kitty Empire 

Mura Masa: Curve 1 review – relentlessly above par

The Grammy-winning UK producer’s first album on his new label is a masterclass in hardcore dancefloor and bittersweet feeling
  
  

Mura Masa.
Mura Masa. Photograph: William Reid

Producer Alex Crossan is both acclaimed and not feted enough. The Guernsey-born polymath won a Grammy for a 2018 Haim remix; recently, he collaborated with PinkPantheress on her hit Boy’s a Liar. But his own stuff is relentlessly above par.

Crossan’s fourth album finds him on his own label, Pond, and building a physical arts hub in Peckham, south London (also called Pond); he’s also putting out some of the most rhythmically inventive earworms of his career. A generous proportion of Curve 1’s tracklisting has already been released – tunes such as the nimble-footed Gimme, whose shapeshifting production invokes the rave era, or We Are Making Out, a slab of electroclash that features Singaporean artist Yeule declaiming about tongue tag on various modes of London Transport (“We are making out on the DLR”). Whenever I Want feels like an oblique anthem to freeing failure. “I’m allowed to fuck up whenever I want,” runs a vocal sample, the swish of drum’n’bass offset by a blithe keyboard line.

The remainder is hardly filler. Giddyp feels like early hyperpop, with Crossan playing with BPMs throughout (“Up! Down!”), while there’s some era-perfect two-step on Shuf (Adore U). Throughout, hard dancefloor action never comes at the expense of wistful, bittersweet feeling.

Watch the video for We Are Making Out by Mura Masa, ft. Yeule.
 

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