Photo by Daniel Reche
As 2025 passes its midpoint and the heat intensifies, this month’s PLAYYLIST maps the emotional peaks and digital fractures of a restless underground. July’s selections lean into friction and finesse, from noir-pop introspection and shape-shifting club tools to glitch-drenched rave and high-gloss hyperpop. These tracks are an odyssey through tension and release, built for after-dark headphones and neon-lit dancefloors alike.
Listen now:
Tracklist:
1. R. Missing – ‘Let in the Night Outside’
Dripping in noir melancholy, ‘Let in the Night Outside’ glides through industrial grit, dark synths and icy yet faraway vocals. R. Missing crafts a slow-motion descent into nocturnal solitude; at once detached and cinematic.
2. Rival Consoles – ‘Known Shape’
Off his new Landscape from Memory LP, this track is precise, tactile, and emotionally taut. Rival Consoles shapes ghostly, minimalist atmospherics and elastic rhythms into something intimate yet vast.
3. Emerald – ‘Frustration’
A jolt of awakening from its predecessor’s introspection, ‘Frustration’ is tense and turbulent, simmering with bottled-up rage. Emerald weaponizes a filthy four-on-the-floor and thrumming acid bass to wield a sweat-slicked statement piece.
4. Command D. x Zara – ‘Cascadia’
Command D’s weighty low-end meets Zara’s hyper-detailed sonic embroidery, resulting in a track that is both grounded and kaleidoscopic. Stuttering textures dance and warp as time slows itself into a spiral.
5. Two Shell – ‘beeep’
Two Shell’s ‘beeep’ off their latest outing IIcons is absurdist club candy. Syncopated rhythms bounce through glitch and gloss, with deadpan vocal hooks and hypnotic loops firing off like synapses.
6. Barry Can’t Swim – ‘Different’
The lead single of his new album Loner sees the Scottish producer deploy a single vocal hook that gets taken on a dizzying ride through sweeping bass, filthy two-step rhythms, a piercing siren, and glitch galore.
7. SG Lewis – ‘Sugar’ (feat. Shygirl) – X & Ivy Remix
This remix refracts the sweetness of the original through a high-voltage haze of wriggling acid sounds and sweat-soaked, thumping percussion, while Shygirl slithers through the fray with perfect menace.
8. Ninajirachi – ‘Infohazard’
A spacious, soaring, synth-soaked first half explodes into a hyperactive rave – a sonic feast of retro-electropop and hyper-futuristic finesse. This track is a refreshing yet undeniably idiosyncratic snippet of what is quickly becoming Ninjarachi’s signature sonic architecture.
9. Danny L. Harle x PinkPantheress – ‘Starlight’
This is a cosmic club cut that lends euphoria a hyper-digital edge. ‘Starlight’ is pure drama — PinkPantheress’ soft, icy voice feels like it may float into the ether, while Harle’s production builds a sky-high glass palace, only to shatter it with breakneck speed and splintering distortion.
10. FKA twigs – ‘Perfect’
We close this PLAYYLIST with twigs’ expansion on the whimsical rave of her EUSEXUA universe. ‘Perfect’ is hauntingly sparse and playfully soft, yet irresistibly danceable – a perfect slice of dance pop to see us into August.
