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Flume, Chet Faker

Drop the Game

The slow, head-nodding single of Flume and Chet Faker's joint EP Lockjaw: Faker's sultry voice over Flume's swishing synths and deep bass, with a video of the Brooklyn dancer Storyboard P.

By korczis 3 min read
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Review

Genre and Mood

Flume and Chet Faker’s Drop the Game is electronic soul at a downtempo crawl. It is sultry, soulful and hypnotic: Renowned for Sound called it “a slow-moving, head-bopping, thump of an electronic anthem” and confessed to playing it on repeat for hours, and the word it settled on was “spellbinding”.

Song Summary

The two Australians had already met on Left Alone, from Flume’s 2012 debut album. In September 2013 Flume announced that they had made an EP together, and said the result “doesn’t sound particularly like Flume or specifically like… a Chet Faker record”, but like a hybrid of both. Drop the Game was its first single, released on 18 November 2013 by Future Classic, four days before the three-track Lockjaw EP.

Musical Breakdown

No source times this recording, so the guide follows the elements reviewers described. The video runs longer than the 3:41 EP version.

The Vocal

Renowned for Sound heard Faker’s “sultry cool voice” laid over the production; Planet Notion praised his “luscious vocal prowess”.

The Synths

Planet Notion’s phrase for Flume’s part was his “distinctive swishing synths”; Renowned for Sound heard “high-pitched frequencies”.

The Bass

Under both sit what the same review called “deep drones of bass”, the weight of that slow thump.

Concepts in Focus

A synthesizer can be a melody instrument or a source of pure texture, and the reviews hear Flume’s in the second role: Planet Notion called his swishing synths distinctive, his own sound. On Drop the Game they sit at the extremes, high-pitched frequencies above and deep drones of bass below, and Renowned for Sound heard Faker’s voice laid in front of both. Listen for how the soul of the song comes from that voice while the synths set the space around it.

The music video, directed by Lorin Askill and released with the single, is one dancer and one street. Storyboard P, a Brooklyn street dancer known for flex and for his own fractured style called mutation, dances on the pavement outside a collision repair shop in Brooklyn. By January 2021 the video had passed 183 million views, a reach far beyond the charts.

Artistic Context

Flume is Harley Streten from Sydney, signed by Future Classic in 2011 after an original-artists competition; his self-titled debut topped the ARIA chart, and its breakthrough was Flume – Holdin On. Chet Faker is Nick Murphy from Melbourne, whose name is a homage to Chet Baker; his debut album Built on Glass followed in April 2014 and gave him Chet Faker – Talk Is Cheap.

Impact and Reception

Drop the Game reached number 18 on the ARIA Singles Chart and went platinum, came fifth in Triple J’s Hottest 100 of 2013 and was nominated for Best Dance Release at the 2014 ARIA Awards, losing to Peking Duk’s High. Reviews of Lockjaw were warm too, and two critics hoped the pair would make a full album. Turn it up enough to feel the bass.

Learn from this track

Introductory

What you will learn

  • Describe how a producer and a singer share one track, and why Flume said Lockjaw sounded like neither of them alone.
  • Recognise the high, swishing synth sounds and deep bass that reviewers heard under Chet Faker's voice.
  • Explain how a dancer's video can carry a song to an audience far beyond its home charts.

Listening guide

  1. the vocal Chet Faker's voice, which Renowned for Sound called sultry and cool, and Planet Notion luscious.
  2. the synths What Planet Notion called Flume's distinctive swishing synths and Renowned for Sound his high-pitched frequencies.
  3. the bass The deep drones of bass under the voice, part of what one reviewer heard as a slow-moving, head-bopping thump.
  4. the video Storyboard P dancing on the street outside a collision repair shop in Brooklyn, in Lorin Askill's video.

Concepts in this track

music video

144 tracks

A short film made to accompany a song. Since MTV it has shaped how songs are remembered, and on YouTube it is often the main way a song is heard.

synthesizer

66 tracks

An electronic instrument that generates sound from oscillators and shapes it with filters and envelopes. Synthesizers define the sound of electronic pop, house and techno.

Listen next, and why

Questions for discussion

  1. Flume said Lockjaw does not sound particularly like Flume or like Chet Faker but like a hybrid. Where in Drop the Game do you hear one more than the other?
  2. A reviewer called the track slow-moving and head-bopping at once. How can a song be both?
  3. The video shows a single dancer on an ordinary street. Why might that suit this song better than a story?

References

  1. Wikipedia. Drop the Game. Encyclopedia
  2. Wikipedia. Lockjaw (EP). Encyclopedia
  3. Wikipedia. Storyboard P. Encyclopedia
  4. MusicBrainz. Drop the Game (recording). Database
  5. Future Classic. Flume & Chet Faker - Drop the Game [Official Music Video] (2013). Video

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