New releases last eight weeks: Dirty Dubstep/Trap/Grime

Review: Following 'Dreams' earlier this year Russian sub server Blocklab returns to White Peach to knock our blocks off again. 'Billy Brandon' sets the scene with a classic bouncer sample the older heads will probably recognise. It's backed up by a beautiful range of flavours... 'Motto' is all about the woozy, wavy modernist wobbles, 'Smoog' brings that slinky, sleazy funk like Silkie while 'Ocean Floor' sweeps us clean with pure emotion. One of the most interesting new dubstep producers to emerge in recent years; big shouts to Blocky.

Review: Chase & Status and Stormzy coming together was always going to be huge. One rules the charts, the other the clubs, and between them they cooked up a massive single that got heard everywhere all summer long, including a special live performance of it in Ushuaia Ibiza. Now you can own it on a slab of vinyl that has been cut nice and loud, which is perfect for the tune - the bass is devastating, the bars from Stormzy are hard, the energy is dark and unrelenting and it's the perfect sort of jungle cross over sound that will continue to be heard everywhere well into 2025.

Review: A vrooming new V/A comp from London's bass music bacchanals 1985 Music, following up a sellout show at the Roundhouse earlier in 2024. Helmed up by pensive liquid purveyor come bass musical all-rounder Alix Perez, the label now compile several star tracks from throughout the year, setting them side-by-side on wax for the first time. Including trax by Perez, Drone, Cesco, Visages, Hijinx and Onhell, the general movement is from sociopathic grimescape though to bear trap tricksiness, shortly tied up in an extended jungle and d&b coda on the B; Paige Julia's 'Indisputable' is as brazenly fearless as Flowdan's opening flows are, though a continual liquefaction occurs therefrom; the best element heard towards the end has to be the erratic bubblegum cutups heard on Visages' 'Dol Guldur'.

Review: Remarkably surreal club reconstructions from Uruguayan ur-producer Lechuga Zafiro. 'Desde los oidos de un sapo' ('From The Ears Of A Toad') is a truly elastic entanglement of designed sound refit for the floor, though we'd not be surprised if a private laboratory set aside for the safe containment and study of sonic bio-anomalies would hope to acquire this one too. Zafiro flexes his hylid hamstrings on this wriggling wet lurch through post-Baile sonics and field recorded club jamborees, emphasising the naturalistically percussive and fretfully textured. Basing his musical identity on field recordings of hard materials - metal, wood, rock, glass - as well as, somehow, animal tissue - from toads, birds, sea lions and pigs (let's hope they were at least taxidermied first) - these seven cochlear leapfrogs make for a highly exploratory sonic escape; Zafiro dares to define the next applicative generation of sound design for the dance.