Dylan Brady has never seemed too interested in restraint. Alongside bandmate Laura Les in the duo 100 gecs, Brady has established himself as one of pop music’s most vulgar maximalists. Together, they swirled together a list of genres longer than a CVS receipt, almost exclusively favoring the ugliest, loudest, and most colorfully extreme sounds their respective influences have to offer. 100 gecs’ records feel as if Brady and Les were taking apart a garbage disposal that had shredded up the last several decades of pop music, gleefully dirtying their hands while searching for beauty in the sludge.
In his work away from gecs, Brady has often operated in a similar mode. As a producer, he tends to work with pop mutators—Charli XCX, xaviersobased, Alice Longyu Gao, Dorian Electra—who favor the kind of pure sugar-rush sonics he’s best at. His 2018 EP for Diplo’s Mad Decent label, Peace & Love, veered from distortion-thrashed dance music to red-lining garage rock to chipmunk-voiced dub inversions. Even his pre-gecs 2015 solo album All I Ever Wanted—by some margin his most straightforward pop record—is full of the kind of broken-glowstick synths that would color all of his subsequent work.
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Brady’s new EP, Needle Guy—his first solo release since 2018—is uncharacteristically focused. While he’s made his name darting between sounds and styles, here he trains his attention solely on dance music. But “focused” doesn’t necessarily mean “restrained.” He announced the EP with a DJ set he recorded at a piñata store, an appropriately colorful environment for the sounds he seems most enamored of lately: big-tent EDM, strobing trance, cranium-rattling dubstep drops, and the head-emptying house music that fills the dancefloors at those festivals that take place on cruise ships.
In interviews, 100 gecs have always denied that their appreciation for certain sounds with little critical cachet comes from a place of irony—they just genuinely love 3OH!3. Similarly, it’d be hard to hear Needle Guy and assume Brady was approaching these sounds with anything less than sincere affection. This is an artist who once described the snare sound on Skrillex and Diplo’s Jack Ü project as a “cultural reset,” and in the years since, he’s worked with Skrillex with some regularity. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the EP also contains songs like “Ashley,” a techno dalliance that interpolates the Dutch DJ Afrojack’s 2010 cult hit “Amanda” and sounds exactly like the sort of thing you might’ve heard blaring from a HARD festival stage that year.
Still, at its best, Needle Guy applies Brady’s prankish energy to unsettling inversions of his inspirations. “Needle Guy” plays like a seasick, stumbling answer to early-2010s trap, excising the chest-bursting bravado that genre pioneers like RL Grime foregrounded in favor of a vocoder belching the track’s title in a nauseous chorus as crushing drops coalesce. It’s both off balance and otherworldly, the sound of a panic attack starting to take hold in the middle of the crowd at EDC. “Throat Song” adopts a similar approach to a progressive-house beat, pairing a relatively straightforward production with a gurgling sound that evokes both a trilling didgeridoo and the echoes of someone retching in a festival toilet. If that sounds annoying, it definitely is, at least a little—almost as if he’d applied noise-music provocation to EDM tropes. But there’s pleasure to be found in pushing through, just enough to make you wish Brady had made all of Needle Guy just a little more prickly.
