I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)

Jamie xx's collaboration with Young Thug and Popcaan is one of the most genuinely joyful recordings in contemporary electronic music — a track that samples The Persuasions' a cappella gospel, filters it through Jamie's crystalline production sensibility, and arrives somewhere between hymn and party anthem, spiritual and physical in equal measure. The steel drums and riddim-adjacent rhythms establish a Caribbean warmth that feels celebratory and inclusive, acknowledging diaspora connections across genres without flattening their specificity. Young Thug's elastic, melodically adventurous verses and Popcaan's reggae-inflected hooks overlay in a way that sounds spontaneous even within a carefully constructed arrangement, the production creating space for improvisation to appear even where none exists. Jamie's production is characteristically restrained — he provides architecture and trusts his collaborators to inhabit it fully. The emotional register is optimism as conviction rather than naivety, celebration chosen by people who understand difficult times and are choosing joy anyway, which gives the track a depth that purely carefree music lacks. From "In Colour," which documented London's multicultural rave culture, this represents the album's most outward-facing gesture: music that belongs to everyone rather than to any single scene or genre. An anthem in the truest sense, with the particular power of songs that feel inevitable once they exist, as though they were always waiting to be made.