Sonic Playground - hi-nrg

dOP - Close Up

2026-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Genre and Mood

dOP made Close Up as vocal house, and its label, Circus Company, sold it as an addictive slice of vivid vocal house. The German magazine Groove heard something older under it, an attempt at New Beat and Hi-NRG, the stiff, machine-driven dance music of the 1980s. Hypnotic and sultry is the pull between those two: a cold, repetitive groove and a warm voice floating over it.

Song Summary

Close Up was released by Circus Company on 26 May 2014, on twelve-inch and digitally, under the catalogue number CCS088, and marked the Paris trio’s return to the label after a spell with others. The original mix runs five minutes and thirty-nine seconds. Circus Company describes it as a groove carrying JAW’s vocals, with soft chords and pads; the release came with remixes by Catz ’n Dogz and San Proper, and the digital edition adds one by Louisahhh.

Musical Breakdown

No review maps Close Up bar by bar, so this page keeps to what its critics heard. Groove’s Alexis Waltz described the groove as machine-like, straight and shimmering, and found it limp and short of energy on its own. Only when the falsetto vocal arrives, he wrote, does the track find a centre. Listen for that change: what the beat does alone, and what the voice adds.

Concepts in Focus

The falsetto is the point of the record. Groove heard JAW’s high, light voice as a nod to the trio’s idol Prince. Here it is the warm element against a cool, repetitive beat, and the reason the track holds together.

The remix versions show how much the same parts can change. Groove preferred them: Catz ’n Dogz turn the track into a surprisingly open, swinging flow over a heavy, hip-hop-influenced house groove, while San Proper first frees the shimmering hookline and then weaves in a delicate, floating groove with a subtle, electrifying drive.

The official music video, which VICE presented in May 2014, is a first-person ride-along of life on tour, which VICE said brings into focus dOP’s best quality, their live performance.

Artistic Context

dOP formed in France in 2006 from childhood friends; Wikipedia lists Damien Vandesande and Jonathan Illel as its current members, and their album Greatest Hits came out on Circus Company in 2010. VICE described a group that toes the line between vocal house and digital pop, with two members playing live instruments while the singer sings live. Hear them with their friends Nôze on Nôze, dOP – In the Back of My Ship.

Impact and Reception

Close Up divided its critics: the label’s addictive single was, for Groove, a weak original saved by its remixes. Play the original first, then the remixes, and decide for yourself.

Tricky, Francesca Belmonte - Nicotine Love

2026-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Genre and Mood

Tricky’s Nicotine Love, with Francesca Belmonte, is the dance floor seen from the trip-hop corner. Stereogum heard a bloopy electro beat, The Skinny hi-NRG minimalism and thumping electronica, and mxdwn the closest Tricky had come to a traditional dance track. The feelings follow the critics: sultry for Belmonte’s furtively erotic vocal, gritty for sweaty dives and sticky dancefloors, defiant for the reason he made it.

Song Summary

The song runs a little over three minutes and was shared on 30 June 2014, ahead of Adrian Thaws, the album named after the name Tricky was given at birth. He told The Skinny it was a riposte to a Facebook message from a fan surprised at his interest in house music: you’ve never met me. Tricky and Belmonte wrote it together, and he produced it, as he did the whole album, in his home studio in London.

Musical Breakdown

No source walks through Nicotine Love bar by bar; the reviews describe its beat, its synths and its two voices, so the breakdown follows those.

Intro

No source describes the opening. Listen for what arrives first, the beat or the bass.

Main Section

The Line of Best Fit heard the synths and bass as entwined pythons and vipers, lunging and slithering amongst each other, over a firm beat. Tricky’s voice is his usual angry-languid-panting style, in Stereogum’s words; Belmonte’s is expansive. The hooks, The Line of Best Fit wrote, are simple: built to be caught on a crowded floor rather than studied.

Outro

No source describes the ending. Notice whose voice you are left with.

Concepts in Focus

Tricky has long shared his songs with other singers, and Nicotine Love shows the <a href=“https://korczis.github.io/sonic-playground/concept/featured-artist/” class=“concept-link font-medium text-primary-700 underline decoration-dotted underline-offset-4 hover:decoration-solid dark:text-primary-400” data-concept=“featured-artist” title=“A guest performer credited on another artist’s track, usually as “feat.”: a rapper’s verse, a singer’s hook or a second voice. Features bring together different styles and audiences and are central to hip-hop, R&B and dance music.“>featured artist as a partner rather than a guest: Belmonte co-wrote it and appears across the album, and Stereogum heard her vocals in the vein of Martina Topley-Bird, his collaborator since Maxinquaye.

The hook here is deliberately plain, which suits the brief Tricky gave the album, his club and hip-hop record. And mxdwn heard the track as begging for a remix. One came within weeks: Young Fathers’ StraightFace Remix, which OkayAfrica heard turn the full-blown house original into a nearly unrecognisable downtempo piece, with Alloysious Massaquoi’s falsetto and whispery vocals.

Artistic Context

Tricky is Adrian Thaws, born in Knowle West, Bristol, in 1968. He rapped on Massive Attack’s Blue Lines before his solo debut Maxinquaye in 1995, where Martina Topley-Bird, heard later on Martina Topley-Bird, Mark Lanegan, Warpaint – Crystalised - Original Mix, sang alongside him. Adrian Thaws came out on 8 September 2014 on False Idols, his own label; he called it his 11th album, and naming it after himself, he said, was saying you don’t really know me.

Impact and Reception

Reviews of the album were mixed to positive: The Line of Best Fit gave it 8/10, and Metacritic averages 67. Play it loud, and hear a trip-hop pioneer answering a doubter on the doubter’s own dance floor.

Bronski Beat - I Feel Love

2026-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Genre and Mood

Bronski Beat’s I Feel Love is the long closing track of an album filed under synth-pop, disco and hi-NRG, and it takes the most ecstatic song in disco somewhere colder. The Quietus called the combination one that “induces cold sweat more than feverish longing”: haunting, full of longing and intense all at once.

Song Summary

On the album the track is a medley, credited as I Feel Love/Johnny Remember Me; the streaming edition titles it simply I Feel Love. It joins Donna Summer’s 1977 hit, produced by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, to Johnny Remember Me, John Leyton’s 1961 chart-topper, which Classic Pop calls a spectral “death disc”. The Quietus adds the detail that makes it memorable: a “sensuous surprise for the ending”, a refrain of Summer and Moroder’s Love to Love You Baby.

Musical Breakdown

I Feel Love

The medley opens on Summer’s song, and it keeps what The Quietus calls “the thrilled, ecstatic whorl of a Moroder soundscape”; the album credits keyboards and percussion to Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek.

Johnny Remember Me

The second song turns the mood: a “death disc”, a ghost song, which takes the medley “into spectral territory, a love stopped in time”.

Outro

The ending brings in Love to Love You Baby, and The Quietus singles out Somerville’s final “baby”, so tactile it seems pressed into the record.

Concepts in Focus

This is a cover version that keeps the sound and changes the meaning. Where Summer evoked, in The Quietus’s words, a woman melting with lust, Somerville sounds frozen. Classic Pop reads it as a reclaiming of the song, made after Summer’s remarks about AIDS, on an album whose inner sleeve listed the age of consent for sex between men across Europe.

Johnny Remember Me enters as an interpolation: Bronski Beat play and sing it again inside the medley, so Geoff Goddard, its writer, joins the credits. A second song can change the first, and here a ghost changes the dance floor.

The lead is Jimmy Somerville’s falsetto, the high, light register he was known for in Bronski Beat. In disco falsetto often sounds euphoric; here, The Quietus says, his voice “turns smouldering heat into an ice burn”. Hear the same voice in the band’s own song Bronski Beat – Small Town Boy.

Artistic Context

Bronski Beat were Somerville, Bronski and Steinbachek. The Age of Consent, produced by Mike Thorne and released by London Records on 15 October 1984, reached number four in the UK. In April 1985 a remade I Feel Love (Medley), with Marc Almond duetting, became a number-three single; this is the earlier album version.

Impact and Reception

Reviewing the 40th-anniversary reissue in 2024, The Quietus ended its account of the medley with “What a lovely way to burn”, and Classic Pop gave the reissue five stars. Listen to the end, for that last “baby”.

Bronski Beat - Why ?

2026-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Genre and Mood

Bronski Beat followed their debut with Why ?, released in September 1984 under the title “Why?”. Where the first single was a lament, this one is a confrontation: synth-pop pushed to the speed and force of hi-NRG, intense and defiant, with an empowering pulse under a lyric about being hated for who you love.

Song Summary

The lyric is about anti-gay prejudice. Melody Maker reported that the song was dedicated to the playwright Drew Griffiths, murdered in 1984, while Smash Hits said it was written for a friend of the band who was forced out of the country by his boyfriend’s violent parents. Musically it is the band’s more energetic side: it opens on a questioning vocal and the sound of breaking glass, then becomes a dance record. Record Mirror said it “sounds something akin to Sylvester meets Pigbag in a battle for dancefloor supremacy”.

Musical Breakdown

Intro

The song starts with Jimmy Somerville’s voice asking its question and the sound of glass breaking, an alarm before the beat arrives.

Main Section

From there the track runs at dance tempo, the synthesizers and keyboards of Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek driving it while Somerville sings high and hard over them. Melody Maker’s Adam Sweeting called the result “all rather twisted and tragic” and praised the “painfully keening vocals”.

Climax

Sweeting heard the song build “towards a tense and involving climax”. No source we found describes the arrangement in more detail, so we leave it there.

Concepts in Focus

Why? belongs to gay club culture as much as to the pop charts. Hi-NRG was the dance music of the clubs, and the band, unhappy with the inoffensive gay performers of the time, chose to put an openly political lyric into exactly that format. Today the song is counted among the gay anthems; the British electronic musician Andi Fraggs has called it his “favourite gay anthem”.

The single came in several lengths: 4:04 on the album, 3:55 on the 7-inch, and a 7:46 extended mix on the 12-inch, plus remixes. The longer cut was made for DJs and dancers rather than for radio.

The music video was directed by Bernard Rose, who also made the video for Bronski Beat – Small Town Boy.

Artistic Context

Bronski Beat formed in London in 1983: Somerville and Bronski from Glasgow, Steinbachek from Southend, sharing a flat in Brixton. The three wrote Why? together; Mike Thorne produced it, recording at RPM Studio in New York and mixing at Townhouse in London. It opens their album The Age of Consent, released by London Records in October 1984, whose inner sleeve listed the age of consent for sex between men across Europe.

Impact and Reception

Why? reached No. 6 in the UK, No. 1 on UK airplay and the Top 10 across much of Europe. Smash Hits called it “a worthy follow-up”, and Spin named Bronski Beat, with Sade, the most important new act in dance music. In 2006 Supermode built Tell Me Why from its lyric and from melodies of Smalltown Boy. Play it loud, and listen to the question in the first seconds.