In the late 2000s and early 2010s, between dreamy cloud rap, the prog aspirations of Brainfeeder, and the commercial convergence of trap-EDM, the lines between hip-hop production and electronic experimentation were blurred like never before. Perhaps the most zeitgeisty example of that confluence was Kanye West’s Yeezus, which brought leftfield producers like Arca, Hudson Mohawke, and Evian Christ into the mainstream. Yeezus wasn’t startling only because of its abrasiveness; it was just so unexpected to hear the biggest rapper in the world entrusting his sound to a new generation of electronic beatmakers. Christ was a relative unknown before his contribution to album cut “I’m in It,” but even though that credit pushed him into the spotlight, the artist born Joshua Leary largely avoided a career as a more traditional producer-for-hire. Instead, he threw himself into the rave, honing his craft as a DJ by way of his long-running Trance Party club night.
Leary’s formal debut album, released a decade after that Kanye co-sign, still features the atmospheric layers that made his beats so bewitching back then. But you won’t find any trap hi-hats here; Revanchist is a ghostly love letter to the pure melodrama and overstimulating sensation of trance music. Opener “On Embers” hits you directly in the chest with massive supersaws, but Christ is just as captivated by moments of silence; indistinct gospel-house vocals hum, resembling shadowy figures silhouetted by smoke machines. “Yxguden” slowly builds with a cresting wave of synth arpeggios, before Bladee’s angelic falsetto and a thumping beat drop in tandem. “Free-free-free falling” are the first intelligible words on the album, evoking the unrestrained release that Christ nudges us toward.
Christ’s palette recalls the glittering stadium schmaltz of Y2K-era trance producers like ATB and Paul Van Dyk, but he amplifies the exhilaration by drawing everything out, letting the euphoric textures simmer. Like Burial did for hardcore breaks and junglism, Leary deconstructs familiar genre tropes and reverse engineers them into alien signals, extracting nuanced emotions from underneath the flashy exterior of pop music. Though tracks like “Yxguden” indulge in the outright ecstasy of vocal trance, Revanchist often denies us immediate catharsis to instead linger in the haze.
Thanks to his focus on live experience versus recorded music over the last few years, Christ’s work has grown slower and contemplative, more conducive to late-night comedowns than warming up the crowd. He approaches trance music less like a DJ weaving discrete tracks together, and more like the composer of a video game soundtrack conceptualizing sound as a spatial environment—Leary cites the iconic PlayStation 1 racing game WipeOut, which featured big beat tracks from the likes of Orbital and the Chemical Brothers, as a vital gateway to his love of dance music. The mammoth trap beats of 2014’s Waterfall EP were straightforward in their construction, where Revanchist is ambitious and structurally complex, trusting the listener enough to follow sounds that evolve in unexpected directions. “The Beach” is an endless swell with no way out, teasing a drop that never quite comes, as a distorted feminine voice bleeds into a rising tide of looping synth arpeggios and bass tones. The voices that Christ weaves in on tracks like “Silence” are lilting and warm, but strange too, mutated into misty choral chants; over the celestial piano of “With Me,” Swedish vocalist Merely stretches out her words, just like Leary’s synths reverberate with streaks of echo.
“Nobody Else” opens with a punishing four-on-the-floor rhythm: It’s like hearing the muted pounding of a rave in the distance and following the sound through the darkness. A chopped-up sample of Clairo’s “North” ebbs and flows before dissolving into pure feedback; at times, the beat disappears completely, nearly drowning in a whirlpool before Leary reels it back in. His sound is defined by its extreme peaks and valleys: On “Xkyrgios,” a raging jungle breakbeat unexpectedly breaks for moments of soothing clarity, like a clearing in a murky forest, only to thrust you back into the thick of the rave without warning.
While Christ has allegedly reunited with Kanye West in the studio, Revanchist positions him as more than just a producer working with a vocalist. Here, he’s an experiential sound designer, drawn to voices for their textural properties. In its heyday, trance music was often derided for its overt sentimentality, fueled by anonymous divas singing easily translatable lyrics about universal emotions. Although Leary flirts with that emotional sincerity, his vision of trance is like a fading memory that finds its own distinct beauty in the fuzzy edges. The “trance revival” has been promised for years, but Revanchist proves that the genre’s comeback isn’t just a phase; it takes this music as its own language rather than a nostalgic artifact, a living thing that can always be retranslated and redefined.
