Tears

Jacob Banks returns, and the emotional territory he occupies with Chase & Status is again the intersection of grief and forward motion — sadness that doesn't immobilize but instead generates its own particular, exhausted energy. His voice here carries a quality that seems to have absorbed more than any individual has the right to have absorbed, a depth registering before you've consciously processed a single lyric. The production is liquid and reflective — drum and bass structures maintained but opened out, given a luminous quality that allows the vocal's weight to expand into the space rather than compete with it for room. Tears as a subject sits at the center of a tradition in drum and bass that doesn't receive enough critical attention: the genre has always been capable of genuine emotional devastation when the right vocalist meets the right track. This belongs in that specific canon, alongside the classic examples of the form that demonstrated the music's capacity for beauty and sorrow in equal measure. Beautiful and heavy simultaneously, which is what the best drum and bass ballads manage without quite explaining how.