You know that feeling you get when you fall in love with a new artist or band and want to shout their name from the mountaintops so that everyone on the planet can know about them? Well, for me, that happened when I first heard New Zealand's Electric Wire Hustle last year.
Their music brings to mind what we heard in the late '90s and early 2000s from the Soulquarians collective. I'm talking modern hip-hop/R&B classics like Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun, D'Angelo's Voodoo, and Common's Like Water for Chocolate. Basically, you get the feeling that the members of Electric Wire Hustle were lounging around listening to these records and realized, "Hey, we could make this kind of stuff, too."
The perfect representation of that sentiment is "Again," the final single off Electric Wire Hustle's self-titled album. It pushes along with a J Dilla-esque beat and then surprises you with a thick bass-synth that would make James Poyser and Questlove proud. Those sounds then mesh and groove beneath the melodic and soulful vocals, which served as the inspiration for the track's time-lapse visuals. In other words: good luck not getting lost in "Again." Don't be afraid to let that happen, either.
Electric Wire Hustle is out now.
