Losing It

Losing It is a machine for making rooms explode, and its brilliance is how little it uses. FISHER — an Australian former professional surfer turned tech-house showman — constructs the whole thing from a rubbery, elastic bassline that seems to physically stretch, a bone-dry kick, and a single sampled phrase repeated until it becomes a chant. There's no verse, no chorus, no melody in any conventional sense; the arrangement is pure tension and release, with the bass dropping out for long stretches so the return hits like weather. The "vocal" is a whispered, breathy fragment about losing your mind on a dancefloor, treated less as language than as a hook to grab onto. What it captures emotionally is not romance or melancholy but the specific delirium of the middle of a set — bodies packed together, the sense of being briefly outside yourself. Released in 2018, it became the record that dragged tech-house from underground rooms onto festival main stages and into commercials, earning a Grammy nomination and defining a sound that dominated the following five years. Best experienced somewhere with proper subwoofers and too many people. On laptop speakers, it's almost nothing — which tells you exactly what it is for.