Bleep

It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from kwes.: his last EP Songs For Midi dropped 5 years ago, equally long since his breakout debut album Ilp., yet still busy in the meantime with credits for HudMo, Kelela, and Solange. New music is therefore always a cause for celebration, and kwes.’s latest work is his grandest undertaking yet. The feature directorial debut from Raine Allen-Miller, Rye Lane follows Yas and Dom through unlikely meetings and misadventures in London, where romance and tension brew in equal measure to the twitchy, playful vignettes of kwes.’s score.

Plenty of tracks are mixed as though coming from another room, or thumping inside the chambers of the heart. kwes. drizzles these intimate moments with the romantic gestures of harps and laughter, crystalline keys twinkling, bells and smooth, blissful harmonies, surrounded by quickfire beats and sound clips in colourfully blurred atmospheres. ‘Intro / Toilet’ is microcosmic with its spectral plucks and a tornado of glitchy vocals switching into staccato funky bass, a prelude to the rapid shifts between coursing breaks and semi-ambient synth funk serenades, syrupy, sultry R&B and solemn chords punctuated by thick silences, guitars like skipping stones and kicks like blood pumping fast and heavy in the ears.

Imposing laser bass undercuts ‘Dom’s Flashback’, turning gothic with trap-flavoured beats and dark harpsichords, while the leitmotif flips on ‘Yas’ Flashback’ into a space opera of synth arpeggios and grand choirs. ‘Wave At Boats’ wells up with quivering strings and painterly landscapes of keys, sitting in between the climactic duets of ‘LGOYH’, singing “Worthwhile love is a handful” over xylophones, pianos, and heavy slabs of beats, and ‘Open Up’, a warm, feelgood closer spotlighting Tirzah’s smokey velvet lows and Sampha’s golden harmonies.

kwes.’s perfectly balances sweet and sour in his score for Rye Lane, endlessly expressive with his unique sonic palette.