Three very different corners of the electronic world. A London chef who makes the most eclectic music imaginable, a Philadelphia attorney dropping his best dancefloor track yet, and a London producer who started making music after giving up on learning to carve gemstones. Let’s go!
William McLaughlin – Dragon Hentai Tears
William McLaughlin’s Dragon Hentai Tears is boldly eclectic electronic music from a London chef who sounds like he absorbed every genre and synthesised something new.
Dragon Hentai Tears is one of those tracks that defies easy summary, and that is the point. William McLaughlin, aka WGMC, aka Billy G. Mc, is a Soho chef and passionate creative who describes his musical influences as everything from Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana to Ella Fitzgerald, Kendrick Lamar, Django Reinhardt and Skrillex, and he lives that omnivorous principle fully rather than filing it away as marketing copy for the bio. There’s chrome-y synths, a giant kick, spoken samples, all wrapped up in a wonderful package.
Every song should be very different from the last, drawing on multiple genres, instruments and playing styles, he says, and the track is exciting, interesting, joyful, weird and unique, all the things he intended. McLaughlin has been putting music out for 12 years, working towards what feels like a singular creative vision. Originally from Devon and now based in Central London, he makes music the way a chef might approach a dish, instinctive, sensory, and quietly committed. It’s fantastic.
Pocket Lint – Cyanometer
Pocket Lint’s Cyanometer is a synth-pop stunner about an instrument that measures the amount of blue inside a person, yes really, and it is brilliant.
Cyanometer opens Pocket Lint’s new album Wunderkammer, in which every song represents an object in an imagined cabinet of curiosities. The cyanometer itself is a real historical device used to measure the blueness of the sky, but here it measures the amount of blue inside a person, which is the kind of central image that sells a concept album single-handed. Built from wonderfully warm synths, 80s drum machines and guitars, it is a brilliant piece of 80s-influenced synth-pop.
Pocket Lint is the genre-hopping musical vehicle for London’s Mark Heffernan, born in the summer of 2020 when he sat on his balcony with sandpaper and tried to teach himself cameo carving from an amethyst block. Three weeks in, covered in purple powder, he gave up and went into the studio instead, and Pocket Lint was the result. We are very glad about that decision, and the rest of Wunderkammer suggests the whole concept is built to last. It’s great.
Adam H Rohit – Need You
Need You is warm, melodic progressive house from Siliguri that lets the tension stretch before the drop arrives, and hits twice as hard for it.
Need You is melodic progressive house that takes its time. Out in early april, the track opens with warm, unhurried melodies before Jaime Deraz’s vocals arrive and changes everything. They really are the standout. The build is patient, layering reverb and delay in a genuinely compelling sound world. The drop is huge; deliberate, and balanced, designed to hit equally hard in the gym or in the middle of a festival crowd.
Adam H Rohit is based in Siliguri, India, a city not typically name-dropped in global progressive house conversations. He’s leaned into remote collaboration as a genuine creative method, working closely with producer Shiva Pereira and now signed with Ice Cream Music Records. He cites Martin Garrix, DubVision and Matisse & Sadko as references, producers who think in terms of scale. Need You suggests Adam is already operating at that level, well before the room gets crowded. It’s great.