Club music will never die, but without a semblance of nightlife, the beating heart of the scene has dropped in pulse, and now that the days are longer and the culture is finding its feet again, as is the music that soundtracks these long, unforgettable evenings.
Born from the bustling underground club scene of Rotterdam, The Policy has been quietly dropping one iconic original or rework after another for a handful of years now, garnering somewhat of a cult following eager to see what members Pierre Hagelaars and Thijmen Hoebink put their hands to next. Up next is “Digitize,” which features a slick and emphatic vocal performance from Editor’s Tom Smith, who connected with the duo after they applied their remixing magic to Editors’ “Our Love” back in 2015.
Bubbling with neon-tinged, irrefutably moving tone from the start, it starts in the shadows, with muted synth arpeggios dancing around the stark, head-nodding beat. Smith modestly meets that energy with his dusky, dulcet tones burrowing into the back of your mind as the textures slowly rise with understated anticipation. A drum machine’s rolling cowbell creates a marked change between sections as it switches up a gear into the chorus, and as the rhythm mildly deviates and the vocal rises into a smooth falsetto, it applies an air of electro-pop nostalgia.
Bringing the energy back down for the verse in somewhat of a cinematic, synthwave fashion, the backbone beat maintains the driving rhythm through the effortlessly undulating dynamics of this stellar return from this dynamite duo.
Providing insight into their process via an email statement, Hagelaars and Hoebink share that, “Digitize was one of those songs that was basically fully written in one day. We were jamming in our studio in Rotterdam when everything seemed to click. The arps, basses and chords quickly combined into a unique aggressive yet grooving body of sound. After some finishing touches compositionally, the song was then sent to Tom who loved the track and with the same creative energy as us, delivered an amazing vocal! He wrote with his lyrics as a sort of ‘misleading story’ about a couple bored of human contact who crave a more digital existence.”
“Digitize” is available now via [PIAS] Recordings.
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