If the music blog ecosystem hadn’t been decimated by DMCA takedowns, streaming services, and the broad centralization of the internet, ”Forever,” by the Danish producer Hekt featuring Smerz, might be ruling the Hype Machine’s charts right now. The mp3 blog aggregator was, theoretically, taste-agnostic, but there was a general vibe to the music that got big there in the site’s heyday: The songs that flourished, like “Paris (Aeroplane Remix)” and “Crave You (Adventure Club Dubstep Remix),” were both pretty and edgy, and often tapped into the primal pleasures of hearing a radiant pop melody atop bassy, Limoncello-scented club music.
That sound flourished in the early 2010s, when, as documented in the uncannily perceptive Zac Efron film We Are Your Friends, the brittle hedonism of EDM offered a respite for millennials in the face of swelling debt and unrelenting joblessness. The underground was not immune from those winds, and it responded in the form of influential producers like SOPHIE, Hudson Mohawke, and Rustie, whose polymerized bass music wound up defining pop for years to come.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Were he to fill out a survey on his influences, I assume Jesper Nørbæk would tick “all of the above.” Forever, his debut album as Hekt, is rich with all the nauseous excitement of a kid trying to square the sugar rush of a Big Gulp with the toothache that comes after. His embrace of the tacky, neon-hued squelch of the early 2010s suits an era marked by wild excess and extreme lack, but these bright, booming pop-techno tracks are far from shallow. Nørbæk seems to remember those songs for what they represented in the moment: freedom, movement, and gritted-teeth optimism. That Forever is being released on Numbers, an early home for artists like SOPHIE and Rustie, practically feels like a foregone conclusion.
On his best songs, Nørbæk hews to a typical EDM structure—verse/build/drop/repeat—but everything on Forever feels bespoke, from the vulcanized bounce of the bass on fizzy opener “Someday” to the thin, diffused kick on shuddering closer “Just Like You Said.” His pop melodies are uncommonly sturdy, and he lets them breathe. “Someday” centers its emphatic, sad-anthemic hook, cowritten by Fine Glindvand and sung by Valeria Litvakov, of the moody Berlin bedroom-pop duo Yorck Street, while “Without You,” with vocals by Nørbæk himself, perfectly captures the generalized melancholy of peak-era Calvin Harris tracks: “I’m feeling lonely without you/Baby, I can’t take it back,” he sings, perhaps with the understanding that these songs beg for big, anonymous feelings rather than writerly specificity.
Pure nostalgia isn’t Nørbæk’s only goal, no matter how much the presence of “But I Can’t Really Show You,” a trance banger with a comically outré brostep drop, may suggest that it is. But he chooses to nod to the contemporary landscape in leftfield ways: “Promise,” an IDM tone poem, feels like an allusion to his peers in the Danish underground pop scene, with its chilly atmosphere and diffuse vocals. The hook of “Big Things”—a voice muttering “Big things coming up!” over and over—plays as brutally effective commentary on the fact that everyone is constantly teasing their Next Big Project on social media these days. These moments aren’t focal points of Forever, but they ground it in the present, adding texture to what could have exclusively been a joyride through Spring Breakers-era sounds.
