Gosh

Seven minutes assembled from a 1980s Chicago radio sample — a robotic voice repeating "oh my gosh" over a jacking, skeletal rhythm — and then patiently rebuilt into one of the most euphoric records of the decade. Jamie Smith starts with almost nothing: a stuttering acid bassline, a dry kick, that sampled stammer. Layer by layer he adds a rising synth figure, then bright melodic chimes, then a wash of strings, until the track has moved from a dark warehouse into open daylight without a single conventional drop. It's a masterclass in delayed gratification and in the London producer's core gift, taking rave's raw materials — hardcore, jungle breaks, Chicago house — and filtering them through the melancholic reserve he brought from The xx. There is no lyric, no singer, nothing to identify with; the emotion comes entirely from architecture. Michel Gondry's video, with its army of Jamie xx clones in front of a fake Shanghai skyline, caught the feeling exactly: mass ecstasy that is also strangely lonely. Made for the peak of a night, but it works just as well at sunrise on a train home, when the crowd is gone and the elation hasn't worn off yet.