The List

You can't swing a oversized glowstick in Glasgow without whacking a HudMo or a Rustie, such is the city's reputation as a creative hothouse for scallywags bashing on MPCs and creating big room beats. LuckyMe labelmate S-Type is another of this merry band of producers making robust, clinical, and swaggering sounds that seem to be all but missing Danny Brown squealing about gobbling MDMA.

There is a real braggadocio and sheen in evidence here, a studious navigation of the popular tropes of contemporary hip-hop / electronic music with big drops, heavy bass and squawking synths. This kind of precociousness once had a real, tangible frisson of daring: Joker’s ‘Digidesign', a dubstep barnburner from all of six years ago, is one that springs to mind when it comes to this synthesis of depth-charge basslines and 21st century synths. Time has dulled this impact a little but with EDM loitering in the background, offering a less subtle but more dynamic blueprint, this technicolour bass music has options, and regularly moves out of the red-eyed basement parties and into more glaring, ravey hedonism.

S-Type (Edinburgh-native Bobby Perman) offers something in between on his new EP, a follow-up to last year's Rosario. These are club tunes, nocturnal and vaguely claustrophobic, with staccato rhythms and keyboard streams both eerie and ecstatic. Opener ‘Fire’ featuring Scandinavian beatmaker Yung Gud is brash and maximalist: a swooping behemoth of sirens, squeaks, chugging riffs and build-ups. ‘Casper’, on which Canadian producer Lunice tags along, is in contrast a more fragile affair, relying on a spartan, solitary whistling synth to drive its slowly enveloping rat-ta-tat rhythm. The EP’s closer ‘Ice’ is the most playful track even if the atmosphere remains airtight. A skittish synth wraps itself around some future-bending G-funk.

And that’s it. The EP offers more clear evidence, albeit measured, of S-Type’s talents and he remains a beatmaker worth keeping tabs on. Yes, another one.

SV8 is out now, on LuckyMe