The kick lands dry and close, four bars of bare thump with a hi-hat ticking the offbeat, and then a bassline slides in underneath and the whole thing leans forward. That is the first fifteen seconds of PWR, and it already tells you what kind of night it is built for.
Ben Miller gives the track almost nothing to hide behind, and that is the point. The low end sits right on the beat and stays springy without crowding the kick, while an acid squelch flickers in and out above it. Soma’s vocal gets cut to a single word and looped until it stops reading as language and becomes another drum. The best decision on the record comes right after the breakdown: the filter opens back up and the drop does not swell, it narrows, everything pulling in tighter around that one looped syllable.
It arrived on IN / ROTATION as part of Miller’s Never Fold EP, with Soma on the feature. This is the first Ben Miller cut in the bythewavs archive, and if the rest of Never Fold sits in this same pocket, it will not be the last.
PWR is made for the back room where the lights stay low and no one is holding up a phone, the late hour when a DJ can lock into one groove for eight minutes straight. Play it there and that single chopped syllable of Soma’s becomes the only hook the room asks for.
Listen on: YouTube · YouTube Music
