New Money

Calvin Harris arrives here not as a festival architect but as someone who has genuinely absorbed the feeling of a Los Angeles afternoon in the back of someone's car with the windows down and the trunk rattling. "New Money" lives in the space between funk and electronic production where Harris has spent his later career — the bass is warm and plucked rather than synthesized, the drums have a snap that sounds touched rather than programmed, and the whole thing breathes with a looseness that his earlier stadium anthems never permitted. There is an aspirational quality to the track, a lightness of mood that does not tip into naivety — the production is too knowing, the arrangement too sculpted, for that. It celebrates arrival, the feeling of having crossed some invisible threshold, but it does so with a grin rather than a fist pump. The guest vocals, wherever they appear, tend to ride the groove rather than deliver a soaring hook, which keeps the focus horizontal and kinetic rather than vertical. This is summer music for people who have outgrown summer anthems, music for terrace bars and sunset drives when the mood is genuinely good rather than performed.