Rayhana vinyl

Following a fine run of releases on Timedance a few years back, polyrhythmic techno king Samuel Smith has decided to strike out on his own. The talented producer's first single since 2018 is genuinely brilliant, with Smith first serving up a hot-stepping, dancehall and bhangra-influenced monster (the soon-to-be-everywhere 'Rayhana', where looped vocal samples, sweat-soaked drums and weighty bass catch the ear), before wrapping exotic, psychedelic, Indian-sounding lead lines around a rumbling broken techno groove on 'Dark Lavis'. Smith rounds off a superb EP with '5g Beats', a hard-to-pigeonhole drum workout peppered with stuttering vocal snippets, fractured electronics and 8-bit bleeps. In a word: terrific!