Poolside like to do things literally. The Los Angeles duo of Filip Nikolic and Jeffrey Paradise named their "daytime disco" project after their poolside home studio. (They aspire to parlay their success into DJing high-end pool parties.) And "daytime disco" happens to be a highly accurate description of their upcoming debut album, Pacific Standard Time-- over an hour of supine and serotonin-spiked grooves that are simultaneously utilitarian and engrossing. It's music for when you're too comfortably situated in a beach chair to dance, but you certainly wouldn't mind watching other people do it.
After years of toughing it out as studio rats and sidemen, the pair began Poolside as an expectation-free reaction to the MDMA-laced electro they found themselves alienated by as DJs. The Danish-born Nikolic played bass in Junior Senior and Ima Robot, started the short-lived nu-rave duo Guns N' Bombs, and co-produced the most recent Bonde Do Rolê album. Paradise DJ'd in San Francisco after a stint in the Calculators, the band that would spawn the Rapture. In Poolside, Nikolic became the singer because it was easy, and if James Murphy didn't start dropping their Balearic cover of Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" in his DJ sets earlier this year, they'd probably have called it a day. "We were slightly drunk when we were making the album-- it's very relaxed in that sense," says Nikolic. "I think it translates."
Wes James is the slightly enigmatic Angeleno behind Le Youth, a producer without a past whose music is steeped in it. His signature sound is a blend of Clinton-era R&B and the house music that was lighting up dancefloors and radio stations around the globe during the same period, and the leisurely grooves, airy synthesizers, and pop hooks of a song like his debut single "C O O L" can easily pull a listener back to the pre-millennial, pre-Internet days when dance music offered a transcendentally blissful brand of hedonism that's considerably harder to find on today's aggro-edged EDM landscape.
"Over the past six months, 200,000 people have streamed Le Youth's sunshine disco track "Cool," which notably pulls from Cassie's "Me & U," and now Ultra have picked up the track for a legit, sample-cleared single release, out July 2nd. Even if you're on the fence about this one—sometimes it's hard to tell with a Cassie sample whether the producer is a true chef or just a waiter, passing off something that was great before they touched it—a breeze through Le Youth's Soundcloud shows he's got promise to spare." --Fader