- Dark, dancehall-inflected club music from two unique producers.
- Where DJ Narciso's music tends towards the funky and light, Endgame's is notably dark, built with a sense of urban brutalism though not particularly bleak or disturbing. There's something playful about it, like the dramatic and cartoonish sense of evil in comic books. On his last album, Surrender, he cited Todd McFarlane—the creator of superhero horror comic Spawn and one of Spider Man's most recognizable villains, Venom—as a main influence, and he even appeared on the cover for Consumed as a masked anti-hero. Even at its hardest, there's something exaggerated about Endgame's beats that softens their blows.
For NXE, he enlists the Lisbon-based producer and Príncipe affiliate DJ Narciso, whose metallic rhythm tracks sit in contrast with some of his label-mates' warmer, more melodic output. His work (and that of his collective RS Produçōes) is characterized by dissonant melodies expressed through blunted toms or sung by unsettlingly alien voices. Together, the duo make music that feels tense but sounds high-contrast and hyperreal.
Opener "CUT" is a marriage of their respective sounds, with Endgame cloaking Narciso's kinetic drum loops in brooding atmospherics, replacing kuduro's trademark offbeat horn stabs with guttural melodies that sound like raspy, detuned melodicas. On "International" their plodding drums are offset with buoyant leads and odd samples that build out the EP's cinematic surroundings, capturing the unsettling energy of dark alleys in the early hours of the night.
This landscape might be most clearly realized on "Sem Limites," which balances melancholy strings and distant airhorns with beats that stumble and fragment, barely holding together. It ends the EP with little resolution, just lingering feelings of sadness and grief that lurk beneath the record's hardened exterior. While NXE is one of the label's few releases from outside the East Asian club scene, its combination of imaginative scenery and industrial grit places it firmly in SVBKVLT's milieu, sharing in the label's sensibility for soundtracking the hyper-accelerated pace of the world's inner cities. By the end of the record, Endgame and Narciso leave us with a heavy weight, a burden familiar to the noise pollution and endless churn of city nights, and one that brings this kind of ultra-stylized club music into harsh realism.
Tracklist01. CUT
02. Nightbreed
03. Internacional
04. Sem Limites