In a 2024 interview, León mentioned being bored with touring and nightclubs and defined that he was “anti-drums” when he started engaged on A Tropical Entropy. Although they’re not the principle attraction, the drums are available in scorching, touchdown out of the blue with needlepoint precision and a low-end heft that crashes like waves in opposition to artifical seawalls. On “R.I.P. Present,” the observe hits high-gear when the dembow rhythm goes double-time. Melodic parts blur like billboards flying by on a freeway, a second of fleeting escape earlier than we’re drawn again into León’s extra insular headspace. Generally issues go too quick, like on “Millennium Freak,” whose stuttering pace dembow drums and muttered vocals create the chaos of arising too quick ad infinitum, the second you notice that maybe what you took wasn’t what you thought it was. The moods proceed to swing with “Hexxxus,” a club-ready, dancehall-ish observe that begins out irritable and twitchy, but finally ends up someplace near horny.
When he’s not DJing or producing pop singers, León calls himself a sound artist—which incorporates his work for an set up centered round a coral reef off the coast of Miami—and A Tropical Entropy contains a few of his richest and most evocative sounds. “Metromover” is underwater techno, with synth notes and vocal snippets touchdown at random like mild filtering via the floor of the ocean. The album’s catchiest track, “Crush,” is simply 91 seconds lengthy and constituted of a collection of seemingly disconnected arpeggios that type a romantic complete gone earlier than you already know it, as if León is catching wisps of smoke and manipulating them till they fade away fully.
These impermanent sounds, the best way they seem to go via glass and water, mimic the city panorama of Miami, proper all the way down to its famously decadent nightlife. The flickering emotional interference is the product of too many nights out, while you’ve rewired your mind slightly too eagerly—and incorrectly. It’s the bizarre peaceful-agitated-buzzing-sad feeling you get after leaving Downtown Miami bar The Nook at 7 a.m. for a pointless post-club drink you positively didn’t want (“Product of Attraction,” which appears like a UK storage love track and lament tied into one excruciating knot, might’ve been made after a bender like that).
Miami is a spot of contradictions that may really feel precarious simply by current: too scorching, continuously underneath menace from hurricanes, in peril of falling into the ocean. Equally precarious and unsuited for our occasions is the lifetime of the DJ—or anybody who has skilled aspirations across the dance music trade. It is a scene that may kill you as a lot because it nourishes you, pulling you into the undertow whereas providing you with fleeting glimpses of success, enjoyable, and glory, placing individuals on a pedestal for the mere act of enjoying music to drink and do medication to.
A Tropical Entropy is a self-deprecating title for a landmark second in León’s profession. Positive, there’s progress right here, however there’s additionally doubling again, beginning over, giving into anxiousness, generally all in the identical observe. The unsteady rhythms and uncertain track buildings reveal the malaise in returning not solely to Miami however to bounce music itself, which makes A Tropical Entropy really feel alive and imperfect, identical to the town it was born in. Delight mingles with restlessness and unease, whereas the sepia wash of melancholy bleeds in on the corners. All of it involves a head because the jittery “Broward Boyy” transitions into “Bikini,” León’s 2024 hit that returns to shut out the album. This oceanside torch track was all the time melancholy, however now there’s one thing else in it. Relying in your studying, “Meet me on the seashore” might both be a romance diminished to routine or a Springsteenian name to flee. Possibly it’s each directly, the sound of somebody locked in a cycle they will’t get out of.
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