Waves

"Waves" exists in two forms, and both matter. Mr. Probz's original is a slow, sun-bleached acoustic-soul record: a plain strummed guitar, a heavy dub-adjacent bassline, minimal drums, and enormous amounts of reverb, so that the whole thing sounds like it was recorded at the end of a pier. The Dutch-Moroccan artist sings in a low, gravelled, unhurried voice with an almost conversational phrasing, closer to a sad rapper's cadence than a soul singer's — he lets lines trail off rather than landing them. The lyric is about drifting: a relationship that has already gone, a narrator who describes himself moving with the current rather than swimming, using the ocean less as metaphor than as a description of how it actually feels to give up control. Robin Schulz's remix — the version that conquered European radio — sped it up, added a deep-house shuffle and a tropical lilt, and turned the resignation into something you could dance to, an odd and very 2014 transformation. Either version belongs to late summer: the original for a comedown on a balcony after everyone's left, the remix for the hours before that, when nobody has noticed the sadness yet.