The Thousands

Bedroom to club production in the UK continues to evolve apace, stepping the future with refinement and fast results. Minted tracks pass about widely and are DJed long before they’re pressed – if ever – making for ingenuity and competitiveness on behalf of young producers, and quick mince of stifling money issues. Collective focus is allowed to cycle through and perfect specific areas of tunes – more or less sub, squelch, phase, Head, MCing – seemingly without end, with names to describe the mutant results outdated as soon as they publish; Grime, Dubstep, Bassline, Aquacrunk, UK House.

**Taking it to this fertile beat maelstrom, then, takes serious talent – Skream, Appleblim and now Bristol teenage prodigy, Joker. Rolling hiphop weight and Detroit synth pulse through the influences of a youth spent playing video games and listening to pirate grime, tracks like ‘Grimey Princess’ and ‘Gully Brook Lane’ have marked Joker out as a watershed artist – leavening the electro-dub palette with renewed melodic sense and pixel colour FX. His tracks have a bassline fetish, but synths take the lines – more like instrumental hiphop than anything, with its love of giddy sound effects. Pressure pleasure.