Friday Dance Music Guide: The Week’s Best New Tracks From Sub Focus & Grimes, Eli Brown & More

The newest single from Sub Focus’ forthcoming album Contact is out today, and it’s a D&B thrill ride with Grimes on vocals. The latter artist’s signature vocals are extremely well-suited for the spatial production of the U.K. legend, with the pair here creating something fittingly bewitching for its Halloween release date which, like its title suggest offers a stunning enmeshment of each artist’s musical abilities.

“I literally could not be more hyped on Sub Focus,” Grimes wrote  Dance music has felt bizarrely sterile and increasingly so over time,” shared Grimes wrote on X in July. “Working on some stuff for his record and it’s literally hitting like the autistic sci fi shit in all the right places like it rly feels like cinematic, like I’m right in Neuromancer. But also it’s genuinely euphoric. It has been so long since I’ve felt euphoric about dance music.”

“Entwined” is out on Casablanca. Listen to it here.

There’s a lot of A-plus stuff happening across “Done Searching,” from the brightly punchy production courtesy of U.K. phenom Eli Brown to the guitar work from German producer Anna Reusch. But the standout here is the melody, an earworm that conjures a mood of happiness and nostalgia, seeming to float across a track that expands and contracts in size to thrilling effect.

“Done Searching” is out on Armada Music. Listen to it here.

Blond:ish fires off an absolute heater of a peak time track today with Israeli techno producer Darco and SoCal-based Broken Hill, whose respective catalogs have been rinsed by the likes of Four Tet, Solomun and a cavalcade of other greats. Together the trio make a lean and muscular tech-house track with a scorcher of a gospel vocal and loads of satisfying auditory twists and turns.

“GOAT” is out on ABRA X. Listen to it here.

Longstanding indie dance duo and married couple St. Lucia this week release the latest single from their forthcoming album, Fata Morgana: Dusk. This track, “People Change,” is a meditation how some people do in fact change, while some people stay the same. This straightforward but also endlessly complex topic is mulled over in a bright, bouncy track that fuses electronic production with loads of analog instrumentation, with the whole song bathed in a sort of ’80s soft rock production that adds to the its immense charm. Meanwhile, Fata Morgana: Dusk is out Dec. 6.

“‘People Change’ is a pretty emotional song for me because it deals with bullying, and the cycle of violence which is something I suffered from as a child but that I also passed on,” the group’s Jean-Philip Grobler says in a statement. “But it’s also about redemption in a way because, well, people change. But also, some people stay the same, it’s just a fact of life. As much as bullying sucks though, I’ve come to realize that it’s an important rite of passage, but people deal with it differently. Some people never get over it, and it makes others stronger and more resilient. The truth is that kids can be mean, but it often comes from somewhere else, whether it’s a parent or another kid, and that understanding was key to me being able to get over and forgive those people, and myself.”

“People Change” is out on Shongololo LLC. Listen to it here.

British favorite Daniel Avery releases a stunner with his sixth studio album, Tremor. Amalgamating styles ranging from shoegaze to techno to industrial to ambient and collaborators from The Kills’ Alison Mosshart to yeule to yunè pinku and more, the 13-track project vibrates with intensity and soars on atmospheric on gorgeous soundscapes, altogether forming a true no skips LP.

“Since the earliest recordings, Tremor felt like a studio in the sky, a space in time through which we could all pass as artists,” Avery writes on Instagram. “It’s the welcoming spirit of acid house with the doors flung open wider to allow in every influence from my musical life: the warmth of distortion, the stillness inside intensity, the transcendental beauty of noise… They have always been there in my music but now it feels like those ideas are being transmitted in Technicolor. This is a record for the post-rave comedown kids, the guitar heads and anyone else who wants to come along for the ride.”

Tremor is out on Domino. Listen to it here.