Penthouse Suite - Working Title

Released: June 6

Working Title is an album that really got me in the first few seconds with its opener. First off it has all the charm of a classic vaporwave album complete with hazy and slightly jazzy keys and chords and some pitch stretched vocals that feel familiar but also foreign at the same time. But for all the genre boxes it ticks, it also incorporates some impressively modern sounding production techniques to great effect. Just on the first track, we get those keys and some soulful stretched out vocals indicative of that classic sound but we also get a bass line and kick that absolutely thumps. It's like there's twelve pounds of groove stuffed into a ten pounds but they still managed to close the bag tightly. The track also gives these little glitchy glimpses and various point, just enough to be noticed but not enough to actually throw the track of in a considerable. These moments make a return later though. 

There's also a couple of tracks that really dive headfirst into a more signalwave type of vibe, eschewing that fat sounding modernized production in favor of something grittier and much more lo-fi. "Late Night Broadcast" pulls this move off nicely, taking us into a nice pseudo-commercial break complete with a little bit of sultry saxophone. Then we go into "Fresh Waters" which give us more of that saxophone sound but in a much more energetic context, maybe even dance-able if dancing is your thing. 

There's some really neat and positively much weirder stuff on here as well. Later on in the album, we get "Backup Access" which is one that threw me for a little bit of a loop as I couldn't tell where it was going at first. It just starts off with a heavily phased and manipulated vocal loop of "here we are" or something like that sounding really weird and spacey. Then it suddenly drops out for a second and - breakbeat? Yes, very nice. We get a fun little random bit of breakbeat thrown in for good measure. It actually works out very well though because the next track, "StarPod Industries," is where those cool glitches come back in full force. The track starts with a nice and tight rhythm that gets more and more thrown off with each glitch. Then the glitches come in faster and faster until we just slowly transformed from vapor to somewhere in the territory of glitch-hop. 

Long story short, this is a real fun album.