When Kornél Kovács set out to record his debut album, four or five years ago, the Swedish producer’s initial impulse was to lock himself away, forget about the winking house tunes he’d put out for the past half-decade—mostly on Studio Barnhus, the label he co-founded with Axel Boman and Petter Nordkvist—and start from scratch. He’d follow a strict regimen, he told himself; he’d limit himself to just one drum machine, sample only certain types of records. Where his music had previously been all in-jokes and lopsided smiles, he would now be disciplined; he would button up the loosey-goosey. But a funny thing happened on the way to boot camp. He started going through old drafts on his hard drives, tracks from seven or eight years before, when he was just getting started, and found himself won over by these “super naïve, careless, basic productions.” He scrapped his original plan and came up with The Bells, a fusion of his latter-day studio know-how and his earliest, most innocent musical instincts.
Three years later, Stockholm Marathon has a similarly easygoing charm. It’s streaked with bright, bold melodies yet marked with a lightness of touch that’s unusual in dance music. Though the sturdy groove of house music forms its backbone, nothing here really screams “nightclub.” Most of its tracks could work on a dancefloor, at least early in the night, but they’re hardly limited to that environment. His twinkling high end suggests natural light, not neon strobes; his beats and basslines are as plump as feather pillows. The “marathon” of the title seems as likely to refer to a Sunday afternoon on the couch as it might some never-ending after party.
But Stockholm Marathon is clearly a more focused effort than Kovács’ debut. Gone are the rough edges of his early work, and gone too the zanier asides. There’s no “Space Jam” cover here, no giddy voices singing “Pantalón!” (Spanish for “pants”). Taking cues from classic drum’n’bass, his basslines are stitched together out of tuned toms, resulting in a sound that’s beefy and full but also swimming in open space—a velvety backdrop for nimble, intricate drum patterns driven by the swinging pulse of UK garage (“Szombat,” “Rocks”) or the finger snaps and triangle of vintage Neptunes and Timbaland (“Purple Skies,” “Marathon”). His ear for detail lets him play with proportion and shift the emphasis away from the obvious: “Ducks” has all the makings of a climactic, club-closing anthem, but instead of snare rolls, crash cymbals, and other trappings of main-stage bombast, he opts for lawn-sprinkler drums and simple, honeyed synths. It’s like the photographic negative of a peak-time banger.
On several of the album’s best songs, the spotlight falls on Rebecca Scheja and Fiona FitzPatrick, better known as the electro-pop duo Rebecca & Fiona. On the opening “Purple Skies,” their airy, gently processed voices offer a wispy contrast against the song’s crisp, clean-lined instrumentation; on “Marathon,” their R&B-honed hook is sleek and coolly compelling. Their contributions give the album an unusual feel: Voices like theirs tend to be heard in the context of pop, EDM, and other styles that emphasize drama. But Kovács holds back, carving out minimalist synth-and-drums grooves that steadfastly refuse to go where you expect them to. Every time a song seems ready to explode, he dials it back; every teasing drop lands back on tiptoes. On the closing “Baltzar,” chopped-up vocals call back to Joy Orbison’s 2009 bass-music classic, “Hyph Mngo,” yet the bleepy, buoyant synths have more in common with Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby.
One does occasionally wish there were a legitimately barnstorming tune here; dance music is frustratingly short on universally loved anthems these days—songs on the level of “Inspector Norse” or “I Feel Space” or, indeed, “Hyph Mngo”—and Kovács undoubtedly has the talent to deliver one. But he has already shown us that he’s plenty capable of more boisterous jams, whereas Stockholm Marathon, he says, came together largely as a process of reflection. Too big a detour from the cool-headed, warm-hearted feel of these low-profile tracks would have risked upsetting the album’s careful balance. Going forward, if Kovács can bring some of the album’s finesse to a bona fide floor-filler—or, better yet, a proper pop song—we’ll all be hitching up our pantalones and preparing to cut a rug. In the meantime, Stockholm Marathon is a snapshot of one of house music’s sharpest minds following his intuition, to delightful results.
