Review
Genre and Mood
Boogie Belgique put Forever and Ever at the start of the album Nightwalker Vol. I. Discogs files that album under jazzy hip-hop, downtempo and swing, and Wikipedia calls the project’s style swing hop, a relative of electro-swing that sets old jazz colour against hip-hop beats. Nostalgic and dreamy is the frame those styles suggest: music that looks back to earlier decades without trying to recreate them.
Song Summary
Nightwalker Vol. I was released on 27 June 2013 by the netlabel Dusted Wax Kingdom, and like the project’s first albums it was given away free under a Creative Commons licence. Forever and Ever is its opening track and runs about five minutes and fifty seconds. Its official video was on the Boogie Belgique YouTube channel months earlier, in October 2012, and the band’s channel also carries a live performance of the song from 2021.
Musical Breakdown
No published review describes Forever and Ever passage by passage, so this review offers a way in rather than a map. The album’s style tags, jazzy hip-hop, downtempo and swing, describe a slow, laid-back beat under material that sounds older than the beat itself. At almost six minutes, the track has time to settle into its groove and stay there.
Concepts in Focus
Forever and Ever comes from the years when, in the band’s own words, Boogie Belgique was a one-man sample project: the Antwerp producer Oswald Cromheecke building tracks alone. sampling, assembling a track from pieces of existing recordings, is the method that defines that period, and it is how a hip-hop producer can bring the sound of old jazz and swing into a new piece. The band’s biography says later albums, Volta in 2016 and Machine in 2022, moved further away from samples.
The project then grew into a band, and the 2021 live recording on its channel shows what that means for a track first built from samples: musicians now play what was once assembled. Compare the swing-and-club approach of Caravan Palace – Lone Digger, by a band Boogie Belgique have performed alongside.
Artistic Context
Cromheecke started Boogie Belgique in Antwerp in 2012, while studying illustration, and released his debut album Blueberry Hill free through Dusted Wax Kingdom. The project grew into a collective of musicians, singers and producers that plays as a full live band; Wikipedia lists trumpet, keys, drums, saxophone and vocals in its line-up. Nightwalker Vol. I was reissued on vinyl, self-released, in 2021.
Impact and Reception
The band’s biography names Forever & Ever among the songs that carried Boogie Belgique to listeners around the world, and counts more than 57 million streams on Spotify across its catalogue. A track from an album given away free on a netlabel became one of the songs that carried the band abroad.
