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DJ Lag - Meeting With The King

Name: DJ Lag - Meeting With The King
Item: DJ Lag - Meeting With The King
Author: Andrew Ryce

Veröffentlicht
Mar 9, 2022
Worte
Andrew Ryce
Label
Ice Drop
Veröffentlicht
February 2022
Genres
House · Gqom · Amapiano

The king of gqom brings together different threads of South African dance music on his show-stopping debut album.
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DJ Lag is synonymous with gqom. He wasn't alone in creating the genre, but he's come to occupy a space at the very forefront of the South African sound, to the point where he's collaborating with Beyoncé and getting ripped off by will.i.am. His debut album is called Meeting With The King, and that doesn't feel like a boast or exaggeration. The 80-minute, 15-track album is the equivalent of holding court, with the Durban artist inviting movers and shakers from all over South Africa—not only in gqom, but amapiano, house and other regional styles—to work with him on the heaviest, most romantic and most forward-thinking music he's ever made. Even as his popularity spreads across the globe, on his debut album, DJ Lag fixes his gaze on his home country, painting a vibrant portrait of one of the world's best and most creative dance music scenes. Sure, on Meeting With The King, you get plenty of gqom. It's some of the best you'll ever hear, from "Chaos"—a collaboration with Durban's new guard, General C'mamane and Omagoqa, that features the most heart-stopping breakdown on the whole LP—to "iKhehla," a tough, snarling workout with guest spots from vocalists who sound like they're triumphantly scaling a mountain. But there's also plenty of coloring outside the lines, too. Describing his recent RA Podcast, Lag used the term "gqom 2.0" to describe some of his newer work, which you can hear on another highlight, "Keep Going." This one is gqom slowed down to around 116 BPM, making it more compatible with the sleek and seductive amapiano sounds also making their way around the world from South Africa. It's still heavy, but it moves differently, and a brass section adds a certain gravitas. DJ Lag's choice of vocalists also brings a new level of majesty to his sweeping beats. "Destiny," featuring Amanda Black, sounds like it was made for the most dramatic Marvel movie never made, with impossibly deep and dark piano stabs dotting the rhythm (and a catchy chorus from Black about asserting yourself and your own worth). It's almost like gqom goes synth pop. The best meeting of the minds comes with amapiano star Lady Du on "Lucifer," where her silky vocals float over metallic clangs and THX-worthy basslines. It's easy to imagine a whole world of possibility from those two songs alone, which feels like the point of Meeting With The King. This is an album intent on showing that DJ Lag can nail any style he puts his mind to, without losing sight of the heaving gqom thump that made him famous. He's already promised a deluxe version with new tracks that will show off a style called gqomtech—an effects-heavy hybrid of gqom and Afrotech—while songs like the opener "Thongo Lami" offer a glimpse into a sweeter, more emotional side of his music, a little more removed from the dance floor. Still, DJ Lag is the king because he knows how to work dance floors both abroad and at home. It's the "home" part that Meeting With The King keeps coming back to. Aside from an inspired, trap-influenced collaboration with Sinjin Hawke, there are basically no outside names, no attempts at Western crossover or American or European co-signs. That's because DJ Lag doesn't need them—hell, the album ends with a self-titled track based around a crowd chanting his name, inspired by an event where the audience yelled it for over 40 minutes straight. He's making some of the best and most powerful electronic music anywhere—dance music that sounds massive and perfectly produced (he mentions having to get "Destiny" mixed down by seven different engineers, to give you an idea of the perfectionism here). Meeting With The King and its theatrical scope might be far removed from the FLStudio-on-a-cheap-laptop origins of gqom, but DJ Lag has lost none of the power of that time—he's only made it bigger, better and world-conquering, showing how South African artists don't have to look outside to define and drive dance music culture.
Tracklist