- There's a somnambulant streak emerging in Bruce's music. For all the curdling static and dread of his 2014 EPs for Dnuos Ytivil and Hessle Audio, the dance floor—adventurous ones, at least—was their natural home, but the slouching throb of Steals seems more suited to dead-of-night bus shelters. You could still imagine the A-side stirring a DJ set: Bruce submerges "Steals" under a low-pass filter, only letting it surface with a wail of feedback. It's another moreish, rhythmically complex banger in the Hessle mould, but its itchy momentum feels more hard-won than usual.
A resonant drum, which could pass for distant mortar fire, beats ominously on the sparing "Relevant Again." It dredges percussion and scraps of noise—alongside a steady tambourine, foil shards, bleeps and static get caught in the drift. Bruce strips down the groove of "Petal Pluck" even further, exposing a simple idiophonic melody, its notes arranged like a collage. The track sounds thin, and yet it's the record's strongest idea. With a five-note loop creeping through a hall of mirrors, Bruce presents a dazzling illusion of space, where reverb accumulates around the melody like candyfloss on a stick. It's a simple trick, one you can lose yourself in time and time again.
TracklistA1 Steals
B1 Relevant Again
B2 Petal Pluck