Round 15 years in the past, a consumer named “airloaf” started importing video clips of evangelical church providers to YouTube. Image flailing arms and rapturous uplift—swooning exorcisms, devotees collapsing, pastors with cordless mics and wild dance strikes. The soundtrack to those extraordinary scenes? Solely the ruffest, tuffest jump-up drum’n’bass. Because of some improbably tight syncing, the bootleg clips—titled “Baptazia: Tremendous Sunday,” in a nod to the legendary Fantazia raves of the early ’90s—collided worlds in ways in which provoked each laughter and awe. Additionally they spoke to a deeper collective perception: of the rave scene as a spot of communion, dance as non secular connection, rudeboy MCs as modern-day preachers within the pulpit.
This mix of concepts is a well-tapped seam in dance music, and with He Hymns, Bristol-born producer LCY turns into the most recent to transpose the worlds of onerous dance and hardcore faith; they name their newest EP an try “to tie songs of worship into membership tracks.” However LCY, whose rhythms are among the many slipperiest in modern membership music, fuses the 2 dimensions with a bit of extra nuance—although no much less punch and roll—than these tongue-in-cheek Baptazia vids.
These 5 tracks deal in themes of our bodies and breakbeats, looking out and non secular launch. LCY has been arranging flickering breaks and hi-def sound design round advanced conceptual frameworks for some time. In 2021, Pulling Enamel launched a fictional character—a hybrid of canine, human, and robotic—and a “dystopian post-human world” known as Ériu; 2022’s “Cherubim” was impressed by “parasitic angel-like creatures” in a surveillance state. He Hymns pulls in need of sculpting a brand new universe, as an alternative offering a songbook of types for imagined inhabitants.
The worth of bodily devotion (“I don’t have a lot, however I give it to you/My eyes, my contact, I’ll give it to you,” runs the ghostly chorus of “Sora”) rubs up towards a craving for that means: “Give me one thing to consider in,” goes “Consider.” These vocals are stripped and whittled, falling over brittle, staccato rhythms like curled metallic shavings from a drill bit. However sometimes, issues do get slowed down; the uneven “Unhealthy Blood,” manufactured from little greater than stuttering vocals and splintered breaks, crumbles right into a type that’s uncharacteristically aimless and unmoving.
Given the claustrophobic tenor of those tracks, it appears like faith, for LCY, means stricture as a lot as scripture. He Hymns presents a route out, however not and not using a tussle: “Unhealthy Blood” is spiny and oppressive, an iron maiden molded from sharp percussion and flat kicks; the 27-second title observe, which acts as a type of mid-EP interlude, appears like being trapped in a nightclub rest room stall, hurried whispers and muted organ licks leaking by the partitions. However when LCY makes room for launch—by way of a luxurious post-jungle bassline on “Sora,” or on nearer “Heartbreaker,” with its gamut of pitched stabs, looping coos, and artillery breaks—it arrives as pure catharsis. “Consider,” the spotlight, is gentle and frothy as whisked egg whites. Finally, LCY reserves their reverence for the moody strains of UK membership music. Church will surely be extra enjoyable if it appeared like this.
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