Here we are in a world where past and future meet, a teetering limbo of a place that pops with pastel lightness, bold bass booms buttressing beneath the breezy surface. Here is a slice of post-rave late-'90s-early-'00s electronic dance music with syncopated synth chords chewy and sweet, wobbly fluttering neon chords like cotton candy, and all with a rumbling backdrop of beats that tumble noisy mouthwatering. 'After Hours' is a bright lamination of sucrose flavours founded on substantial elements that give the cradling haze of cuteness a standoffish sense of dance dislocation, highly impersonal but also highly loveheartable too.
Created by LA-based producer VenessaMichaels and inspired by Yūta Nishio (西尾雄太)'s manga After Hours, the track feels smooth to the touch, light but heavy like freshly kneaded dough, decorated with variegated tracts of synth that swirl sometimes half-abrasive and reflective of a feeling of confusion, echoed by the vocal samples which also call out not necessarily celebratory or triumphal but more like internal yells of life and living. The intro feels somewhat grave, verging on melancholic in the guitaresque arpeggio resonating with a cooling loneliness over the stumbling stutter of the beat. Raving and cute, inward facing yet extroverted, solid but hazy, 'After Hours' blows hot and cold in a really neat way, displaying two sides of the coin at the same time for an illustration of internal struggle and finding one's place in the world.
- 🔔 VenessaMichaels collaborated with Viz Media for this track, which is of course named after the manga which they licensed towards the end of last year. The media group describe Yūta Nishio's After Hours as "a heartfelt story about a young queer woman coming into her own and finding her place in the world."
