“The next future garage mastermind destined to blow up in 2010…
We’re currently at a new crossroads in electronic music. Tipping into a new decade, underground beats are at their most fertile and fecund in years. Dubstep has broken all the rules and blown the game wide open, clearing the way for a new kind of producer, whose stock in trade is not tied down to any particular genre, but which draws from all the bass heavy styles and reassembles them into funky, polyrhythmic shuffling Frankenstein’s monsters. Artists like Martyn, SBTRKT and Joy Orbison are combining UK garage beats with fragments of techno, dubstep, drum & bass and house to create fresh sonic alloys, but of all the fully-formed new artists to have emerged recently, none have generated quite the buzz of mysterious South London producer Deadboy. His first EP for Well Rounded, ‘U Cheated’, emerged with little fanfare at the tail-end of 2009, but caused a seismic impact with its three stunning cuts. Ranging from the techy, lazer-guided bump ‘n’ flex garage of ‘Brock Lee Riddim’, to the catchy male r&b vox and club-crushing percussive heft of UK funky bomb ‘U Cheated’, it was quite an announcement. With last track ‘Heartbreaker’ tapping into the tear-stained, mournful Burial headspace, and honouring dance music’s lineage of happy-sad, melancholic moments on the dancefloor, it appeared that in Deadboy, we had a new wunderkind in our midst. Now, he’s poised to take it up a notch, with a massive debut track for Glasgow’s super label Numbers, ‘If U Want Me’, which is threatening to be the next ‘Hyph Mngo’: if in doubt, play Dead.”
DJ Mag, February 2010 (issue 482)
