Bleep

Gage returns to Crazylegs following grime/vogue hybrid ‘Bad Bitch’ and before that the ‘Telo/Shiftin’ single in 2014. Those epochal club tunes have more than lasted the course, but Mercury is a significant step up in terms of scope and ambition. This is club music at its most heavily abstracted, where the organic marries imperceptibly with the mechanical and the club as a 3D space is more important than the dancefloor as a 2D plane. ‘Turbulence’ kicks things off in a terrifying manner, like some unimaginable beast snarling and clawing its way through the darkness, with industrial scraping and drilling reminiscent of Bloom’s Hydraulics EP. ‘Gruellin’ packs all the searing power of a column of lava. ‘Hyphema’ is absurd in the best possible way, and certainly the most approachable thing here, with its super bouncy and colourful synth line. Of the two longer tracks, ‘Rochester Way’ has a vicious drum pattern that snaps at your heels, while the ping ponging metallic pulses of ‘Talon’s Reach’ give off something of a Night Slugs vibe.