Clement Bazin - Come to This

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

Genre and Mood

Clement Bazin, as Spotify credits him, or Clément Bazin, opens his Night Things EP with Come to This: electronic music with a house pulse and the voice of a steel drum. French Wikipedia notes that his style is often filed under tropical house, while he calls it euphoric; this early track is where that blend begins, melodic and vibrant.

Song Summary

Bazin, speaking to Unidivers in 2018, called Come to This one of the very first tracks in which he worked the steel drum into his music. He started music on that instrument as a child, and a later profile describes his electronic tracks with the steel drum at the front of the mix, tropical textures and touches of soul. The label tagged the EP house music, beatmaking, piano and steel pan.

Musical Breakdown

No source describes this track part by part, so this guide stays with what the sources say about its sound.

Main Section

This is one of the first tracks in which Bazin set the steel drum inside his electronic music, the instrument he would later keep at the front of his mixes. Phonographe heard the EP’s six tracks as very melodic, and Come to This is the first of them.

Outro

At 4:12 it is a compact opener, followed on the record by Aloe.

Concepts in Focus

The label’s house tag points to the house groove, the steady pulse that lets a track sit in a DJ set. Here that pulse meets an acoustic, melodic instrument: the steel drum of Trinidad and Tobago, which Bazin likes to take out of its usual context, set into Paris electronic music.

A groove is how the parts lock together in time. The steel drum is a percussion instrument that plays melodies, so it belongs to both sides of that lock at once, part rhythm, part tune. Compare how FKJ built a groove around instruments he plays himself in FKJ – Lying Together.

Artistic Context

Bazin discovered the steel drum at ten, at a neighbourhood party. He played in orchestras, taught the instrument at the Paris Conservatoire according to French Wikipedia, and toured for years with Woodkid on percussion and steel drum. In the mid-2000s a friend introduced him to West London’s broken beat scene. His first label, With Us Records, advised him to combine the steel drum with electronic music, and Night Things came out there: six tracks released on 18 December 2013, also as a numbered 10-inch vinyl of 300 copies with a silkscreened, handmade cover and a handmade book. He later moved to the Paris label Nowadays Records.

Impact and Reception

Phonographe placed Night Things at the top of the young label’s catalogue. The track is here as the first step of a sound Bazin went on to develop for a decade. Listen for the steel drum.

Tones And I - Dance Monkey

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

Genre and Mood

Tones and I’s Dance Monkey is pop and electro-pop with a street performer’s instincts: catchy, playful and energetic enough to stop people walking past.

Song Summary

Toni Watson wrote the song about busking. She told the radio host Smallzy that it is about the pressure she felt to keep entertaining people on the street, who would shout for more or simply leave, and that if “dance for me” is replaced with “sing for me”, it is pretty literal. She recalled writing it alone in a dark closet in about thirty minutes. Konstantin Kersting produced and mixed it in his Brisbane studio, and it was released on 10 May 2019.

Musical Breakdown

Intro

There was no demo. Watson played Kersting the song as she performed it live, built from loops, and its main eighth-note keyboard line, which she played on a Korg Minilogue, opens the record.

Verse 1

No source walks through the verses. What Kersting describes is the bass Watson played on a MIDI keyboard, which he layered from Moog synthesizers and swung to make it more jagged.

Build-up

In the pre-chorus the kicks arrive, with an 808 added underneath.

Chorus

The first chorus is deliberately lean: a kick, the bass line and a snap. The second becomes a double chorus with backing vocals, guitar and keyboard.

Bridge

The middle eight passes through a vocoder.

Climax

The final chorus adds what a loop station could not: big group vocals that Watson recorded with friends, guitars and more keyboards.

Concepts in Focus

Dance Monkey began as a loop performance. After she lost her retail job, Watson bought an RC300 loop station and busked up and down Australia’s east coast with it. In the studio Kersting kept that skeleton and expanded it to 19 keyboard tracks, from a piano sample to a steel drum, so that they would make one cohesive sound.

Her busking version already had a four-on-the-floor kick in its drop; on the record Kersting layered five kick sounds in the chorus. The hook is the chant itself, sung back to the crowd that demands it.

The music video, directed by Liam Kelly and Nick Kozakis, casts Tones as Mr. Tones, an elderly man who sneaks out of a care home with friends for a dance party on a golf course. For another 2019 Spotify giant, compare The Weeknd – Blinding Lights.

Artistic Context

Watson grew up on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne and moved to Byron Bay in 2017 to busk, where she met her manager, Jackson Walkden-Brown. She signed to Bad Batch Records in February 2019; Dance Monkey was her second single and appeared on her debut EP, The Kids Are Coming.

Impact and Reception

The song topped the charts in more than 30 countries, spent 24 weeks at number one in Australia and eleven in the UK, a record there for a female artist, and was the first song by a woman to pass three billion streams on Spotify. It won Best Pop Release at the ARIA Awards, yet Watson has said she loathes it a lot of the time. Listen for the busker inside the hit.

Sonic Playground - steel drum

Clement Bazin - Come to This

Genre and Mood

Song Summary

Musical Breakdown

Main Section

Outro

Concepts in Focus

Artistic Context

Impact and Reception

Tones And I - Dance Monkey

Genre and Mood

Song Summary

Musical Breakdown

Intro

Verse 1

Build-up

Chorus

Bridge

Climax

Concepts in Focus

Artistic Context

Impact and Reception