Bleep

From his early days as a DJ on his NTS show Precious Metals, South London producer Endgame has moved from strength to strength, releasing quick hits of deconstructed club bangers on Hyperdub, PTP and Golden Mist using dancehall, hip-hop and experimental music as a launch pad for some of the most ambitious dancefloor abstractions we’ve come across these past few years. Even so, his debut LP Surrender is a record of firsts. Beset by an unknowable darkness following the death of his father, Endgame steps up to deliver distorted vocals and lyrical musings on the eternal.

Each track on this LP feels loaded with ideas lifted from a shadowy period of one’s life. Serrated hi hats and bellowing bass carve out a twisted trap wasteland on ‘Barbed Heart’, as rapper and Bala Club affiliate Yayoyanoh contorts and mutates his bars across the pitch spectrum. The toxic mist clears on the likes of ‘Exhumed’ and ‘Lacerate’ to reveal brutal drum n bass monstrosities, trawling across mounds of ice-encrusted synths and autotuned programming. Brutal in tone and brutal in subject matter, it’s no exaggeration to call this collection of songs some of the greatest of Endgame’s long and prolific career.

Black metal and industrial in spirit with a fixed gaze at body-moving stimuli, Surrender is a miraculous amalgamation of club-centric beats and truly fearless experimentation.