On “Boy-U,” a new song from Indianapolis musician Fennec, he draws from a long, illustrious line of soul-sampling house producers, creating a track that’s blasting and delirious, with distant echoes of Nineties classics (Pete Heller’s “Big Love”) or more recent triumphs in the same vein (Midland’s “Final Credits”) — a dance floor dream brought to life.
The samples here are deployed with reckless glee: Fennec builds crooked towers out of vocal snippets, female voices that fly up the scale and pirouette back down, somersaulting like gymnasts and sticking difficult landings. He triggers a new sample before the first has even finished, creating a beautiful babble, a glorious assortment of warbles and trills that’s hard to understand and harder to dislike. High in the mix, everything shimmers and darts; below it, a nasty disco loop does the heavy lifting, demanding movement with a domineering four-to-the-floor pound that doesn’t let up for around five minutes.
Even when it seems like Fennec couldn’t possibly inject more energy into the track, he finds ways to add intensity — a strafing horn section, or a sudden double-time pattern on the cymbal. And to amplify “Boy-U”‘s appeal, Fennec released a cheerful, grainy video where the footage of dancers is charmingly disconnected from the pile-driving rhythm.
“Boy-U” appears on Free Us of This Feeling, which came out at the end of January. Find a playlist of all of our recent Songs You Need to Know selections on Spotify.