There have been a lot of productions which have used a sudden modulation towards the end of a song as a cheap means of squeezing out a bit of extra performance intensity, so the key-shifted final chorus repetition we get here has a good deal of precedent – but that’s about as far as things go in terms of it making any sense! For a start it shifts down a half-step, rather than up...

In this MOBO Award-sweeping song, Dean continues the increasingly popular trend of two-chorus song structures, an approach that offers more space for chorus repetitions within a shorter overall run time. After all, why bother with a middle section if your song hardly lasts long enough for anyone to get sufficiently bored of the hook that a mid-flow injection of new material is r...

This is a production which features that classic hip-hop staple, a kick-drum that’s distorted just enough to ‘fold’ slightly on itself, as if your speaker’s woofer’s bottoming out, unable to cope with the driver excursions demanded of it. But where a lot of modern productions seem to achieve this kind of sound with simple digital clipping, a glance at the waveforms suggests that...

The mix sonics here have clearly been optimised for the most mass of mass-markets, in that the priority is clearly maximum audience reach rather than necessarily the most pleasant listening experience. So not much mix real estate is going to headroom-stealing low end, for example. There’s no EDM weight to the kick-drum here, despite abundant disco influences elsewhere in the pro...