European club meets bubblegum trap
BBY GOYARD is a serial innovator. From his breakout single “Run Shannon Run,” which drew together bouncy, psychedelic trap production and minimal, breathy vocal lines, BBY GOYARD has come a long way. His surprise tape Eastern Promises picks up the dance music energy displayed on his recent track “95IRONMAN” and brings it to its logical conclusion. bbygoyard trades syncopation and 808s for rumbling 4-on-the-floor kicks straight out of European house. Production from deegs, jcam and angelboy layers candy cane synths, spectral vocal chops, and swirling pads with the addictive nostalgia of classic dance drums.
Throughout its runtime, Eastern Promises is a bold tribute to the joy of experimentation. As BBY GOYARD plays with the motifs of contemporary pop, letting them sink and slip through the filter of retro-dance aesthetics, they find new meaning and reveal themselves, not as tried tropes but as the seeds of genre evolution. Throughout, BBY GOYARD’s high-pitched vocals anchor this experimentation in a sticky, reliable motion. On “STILLETO HEELS,” bubbly arpeggiators collide with airhorns over a thudding dance beat, and as BBY GOYARD’s vocals fall away, the song feels as if its transforming from a muted trap anthem into a 90s happy hardcore track.
And yet, there is a sinister undertone to the tape. Similar to the Cronenberg film from which it borrows its name, the project is about the vitality of intensity, the unstoppably aggressive movement of living. Like Cronenberg and other great American directors, BBY GOYARD disrupts the stability of meaning with the movement of style. While in the film, scenes of elaborate violence achieve this effect, BBY GOYARD works to create a similarly intimate tribute to the enduring intensity of dance, “I feel like blood on the hands,” he repeats on “COUPE DE GRACE.” “Feng shui yea / Bean in a bubble tea,” he says later on the same track, a line that may well serve to summarize his entire creative project — harmony and ecstasy.