Chicago footwork producer Heavee first acquired a taste for dance music through cartoons and video games. In an interview, he cited the breakbeat-laden scores from The Powerpuff Girls and Jet Set Radio Future as his introduction to electronic music. Some of his first tracks he produced on a Playstation 2, using Funkmaster Flex’s Digital Hitz Factory. On his 2018 debut album with the Teklife collective, Heavee’s lush, nostalgic synth arrangements set his style apart from the more minimalistic sound of his peers, and 2022’s Audio Assault EP, on Hyperdub, nodded even more clearly to the sounds of his youth, using eerie melodies and 16-bit samples to emulate the atmosphere of boss battles.
Heavee’s first full-length for Hyperdub, Unleash, is largely a study in sound design, exploring strange metallic textures, new-age kitsch, and vintage club chord progressions. “Unlock!” opens with gnarly bass tones that sound like the growls of a high-level beast in a role-playing game, accompanied only by droning pulses of static. It’s a profoundly unsettling intro (especially for a track slotted so early into a dance record), but Heavee’s patience pays off when the elements finally coalesce into a beat. The result strikes a balance between Hausu Mountain’s proggy sound collage and SOPHIE’s most purely percussive experiments; it’s a wasps’ nest of intersecting hums, harried fluttering, and insectoid chirps. “Whiplash” is a similarly industrial reconstruction of footwork: Around woozy, pitched-down commands to “act a fool with it,” Heavee hammers away as though he were erecting scaffolding in the backdrop. It feels like dancing as the club is still being built around you.
Elsewhere, Heavee offsets those pared-down cuts with baroque orchestration. Opener “StarSeeker” is as pretty as footwork gets, with sparkling synths reminiscent of ’90s IDM; “Smoke Break” enlists multi-instrumentalist Takayuka Nakamura to play live trumpet over dreamy jazz keyboards. A couple of tracks eschew drums entirely, focusing instead on Heavee’s fondness for the sounds of classic synths. With more traditional footwork cuts like “CanUFeelIt” and the Goodie Mob-referencing “WorkMe’’ filling in the space between the producer’s more out-there ideas, Unleash acts as a survey of both the genre’s history and the artist’s own.
Unleash connects the chrome-plated optimism of Y2K pop culture to its influence on both a young Heavee and the cybernetic grit of early footwork, while charting a path forward that acknowledges contemporary avant-garde club sounds. The album can be chaotic, jumping from one disparate idea to the next, but each element draws you closer to understanding Heavee better. Where many footwork records work with a relatively contained set of samples and timbres, focusing most of their attention on rhythm, Heavee is an ambitious world-builder: Each track sounds like it’s been sourced from a different planet, but their intersecting orbits sketch a picture of the artist’s unmistakable vision.
