Heavy & Gold – Stay Underground, It Pays 16

Fresh from delivering a killer EP on Phonogramme, Chris Lyth brings his long-running Jacksonville project to another French label, Stay Underground, It Pays, for the first time. Predictably given Lyth’s track record of making largely very good deep house, he’s hit the mark across the five-tracker. He begins via the loose-limbed drum machine beats, classic deep house chords and warped analogue bass of ‘Heavy & Gold’, before encouraging us towards peak-time dancefloors on the timeless ‘Just Another High’. ‘Rapido’ blurs the boundaries between late-90s speed garage grooves and late-night deep house haziness, ‘Parallel Love’ is tactile deep house dreaminess personified, and ‘Miz & Ida’ offers Luyth another chance to express his love of mind-mangling basslines and spacey synth sounds.