Everything IZCO touches seems to turn to gold, as is the case with his masterful debut album ‘Powerscroft’ on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings. Here, the Londoner explores nostalgia with a nod back to the Hackney streets he grew up on (including the album’s namesake), and an entire lineage of sound he’s grown with over the years. Gorgeous sunny garage, soulful dub and crisp breaks piece together a picture-perfect collage of IZCO’s many influences and trialled eras, with additional features from his friends and frequent collaborators.

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London-based DJ and producer Ilya Gurin-Babayeu’s new EP ‘XXLG’ feels like his most precise yet, with a technically adept offering of breaks, deep techno and percussive numbers, complete with mastering from Leod. While this four-tracker draws influences from his techno predecessors including Ilian Tape and Basic Channel, Gurin-Babayeu attempts to “keep things intuitive” on this one. 

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Written at a particularly poignant moment in their life, Maude Vôs’ latest EP ‘Medicinal Properties’ lets all that emotion lay bare through six bass-forward tracks that pull from the natural world. The LA producer cleverly runs through halftime, IDM, dark breaks and much more as they draw together a cinematic landscape of soundsystem music. 

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Chicago footwork legend Heavee delivers one of his most club-centred EPs yet with ‘Mainframe’, blistering through breakneck percussion, fizzling cymbals and booming bass across its four-track run. While the lead track, ‘What U Need’, jumps headfirst into footwork freneticism, the closer, ‘Chainsmoke’, featuring DJ Manny and DJ Lucky, piles on cavernous synths and a low-tempo rhythm. That isn’t to say Heavee’s penchant for video game motifs isn’t present here, ‘Work It Out’ curves its way around a Sega-era synth, while ‘Mainframe’’s twinkling chimes give the track an otherworldly, soft-edged feel.

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Are you in the market for some proper, cheek-frying, eyeball rattling, brain-tumbling dub this summer? Well good news, Dublin-based imprint Woozy has returned with the fifth edition of its compilation series, and it's full of the stuff. Ranging from Bambi’s cascading, scuttling bass slaps on ‘Lotus Glow’, ominous textures from Annebel on ‘Trick Pony’, to rampant low-end percussion on softi’s ‘Insomnia’, the compilation’s latest outing is destined to send your head, and likely your nervous system with it, to the stratosphere. Be warned. 

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There’s long-awaited returns and then there is Speedy J, sharing his first full-length solo album in two decades. Named so both for it being roughly the same length as two sides of a cassette tape and the Dutch minimal techno don’s preference that we listen to it while - you know - ‘Walkman’ expands across a mind-bending 20 tracks, plying us with ricocheting, trickling percussive waves, soft-bottomed bass stabs that gather more rampant, hypnotic, fizzling synths. All the good stuff. Don’t skip through, don’t play a few tracks and muse over them — playing ‘Walkman’ in its entirety takes the record from intelligent to transcendental. 

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Yu Su’s music has always felt unplaceable, characterised by woozy and textured atmospheres. On her second album ‘Foundry’, the China-hailing and now London-based artist leans into exploring the ‘in-between’. Pulling from the deeper pool of inspirations she’s encountered, from dub to ambient techno, the music feels sensorial and lived in. Originating from a live show written to play at MUTEK, there’s also more of a sense of performance and ceremony. The bold, opening bass notes and whispered vocal murmurs of ‘A Jewel’ (ft. Dip In the Pool) are pure atmospheric scene-setting, drawing listeners in, before she absorbs you further with ebbs and flows across spacious ambient, wigged-out minimal, and many more sonic brush strokes.

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In a Canadian musical pairing more powerful than that OVO and that XO, Toronto’s finest Peach lands on laidback Vancouver label Mood Hut with a stirring five-track exploration of the relationship between sound and the body. As anyone who’s leapt out their skin at the violent scrape of strings in a horror film or felt their anxious shoulders slump in relaxation to ambient haze will know, sound affects the body in ways we can’t necessarily control. On ‘Soak Vol. 1’, Peach hones in on that notion, inspired by the sensory overload of a trip through Asia. Aqueous textures are at the heart of EP, drifting hazily, squelching wetly, or shimmering amorphously, as unstable synth tones and wigged-out minimal also cut through,  evoking feelings from alertness to indulgence.  

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Described by the label as sounding like an “Antipodean lovechild of Kraftwerk and Egyptian Lover”, this EP serves up proper electro swagger from everyone’s favourite Aussie reptilian. That Kraftwerk influence is unmistakable on the title-track, with its male vocoder refrain, chanting earnestly about being a machine that can’t stop dancing in a jittery electro framework that packs a punch at its core. ‘Future Proof’ pulls from the Drexicya school of electro funky, letting some angular, wigged-out acid lead the way. While closer ‘To Be Continued…’ takes things slower and deeper, coming up for air with soft melodic breakdowns, before plunging right back into screwface fuzz.

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