Friday Dance Music Guide: The Week’s Best New Tracks From Zedd, Swedish House Mafia with Alicia Keys, Tycho & More

This week in dance music: An all-star collection of French electronic artists including Jean-Michel Jarre, Breakbot, Busy P and Alan Braxe were announced as performers for the closing ceremony of the 2024 Paralympics Games in Paris; Chase & Status’ Stormzy collab “Backbone” continued its run at the top of the U.K. Official Singles Chart; we spoke with The Blessed Madonna about her forthcoming album and aspiring to be “a little shard of glass in the industry’s foot”; Charli XCX teased a new project; artists including Tokimonsta and Louie Vega offered free music in exchange for participating in democracy; we spoke with producer Clams Casino; Clean Bandit & Zara Larsson’s “Symphony” hit No. 1 on the TikTok Billboard Top 50; ADE 2024 expanded its program; and we talked to the CEO of Burning Man, which is happening this week, about the more than 100 other official Burning Man events that happen around the world.

And of course, there’s the music. These are the best new dance projects of the week.

Zedd, Telos

There’s a barrage of different styles and influences on Zedd’s new album, Telos, but on every single one of the 10 tracks, you can hear the great ambition embedded in the project, and also the achievement of its lofty aspirations. The long-awaited follow-up to the producer’s 2015 sophomore album, True Colors — which along with his 2012 debut Clarity set him up as a wunderkind of the EDM era, with a special dexterity in that genre’s pop impulses that delivered a string of hits to the Hot 100 — Telos finds the artist born Anton Zaslavski flexing every one of his musical muscles. The project shows off his classical training and good taste across productions that span classical, jazz, cinematic maximalism, Middle Eastern sounds and electronic party music that nods to the EDM origins of Zaslavski’s career, but evolves his sound into a sophisticated, nuanced (but yes, still danceable) place.

The album features an all-star collection of collaborators, including Bea Miller, who’s on both lead single “Out of Time” and the hooky, punchy “Tangerine Rays”; John Mayer, who adds his singular laidback cool to the jazz fusion influenced “Automatic Yes”; stadium rock stars Muse, who lend operatic grandiosity to the album-closing, spiritual “Epos”; and even Jeff Buckley, who Zaslavski reinterprets with style and grace on his version of the late artist’s 1994 “Dream Brother,” which leans into Radiohead territory without being reductive and hits hard with its string-drenched drops. Altogether, Telos just doesn’t sound like anything else produced recently in the electronic world or, arguably, beyond.

But the artist explains the guiding principles here best, with Zaslavski saying that the Greek word “telos” has multiple meanings, one of them being “accomplishment” or “completion of human art. I’ve always dreamed of creating an album that, 30 years on, I can look back and be incredibly proud of. That will be just as amazing then as it is right now, because it’s not based on trends or sound design that might fall off — it’s based on music, just like the albums that shaped me growing up that I still adore to this day. With Telos, I created something I didn’t think I was capable of — it just took a bit of time to get there.”

Zedd soon to bring the album to a live format with a fall North American tour that includes shows at the L.A. State Historic Park, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

Tycho, Infinite Health

Few producers capture the heady, sun-soaked psychedelia of NorCal as well as Tycho, who again takes us up the coast and into the redwoods with his seventh studio album, Infinite Health. The project is classic Tycho, offering tracks that are clean yet emotive and sophisticated while still getting the blood pumping, simultaneously capturing brightness and melancholy through often hazy, lo-fi IDM that contains thematic multitudes.

“‘Green’ and ‘Devices’ represent the conceptual bookends of the…album,” the artist Scott Hansen writes. “‘Green’ is an elegy to my childhood home, a once-rural town on the outskirts of Sacramento where I spent my youth forging a deep connection with nature. ‘Devices’ represents the struggle to stay connected to nature and our own humanity in the modern world. I wanted to illustrate this tension with a set of sonically contrasting songs.” The album is out via Mom + Pop Records in the U.S and through Ninja Tune in the rest of the world, and the 27-date Infinite Health tour will take Hansen across North America this fall.

Swedish House Mafia & Alicia Keys, “Finally”

Having woven their edit of Kings of Tomorrow classic into their sets for years now, it follows that Swedish House Mafia have now fully revamped the 2001 house anthem, bringing in none other than Alicia Keys for vocals and trading the brightly bumping bassline, hi-hat and warm keyboards of the original for a much bigger and more urgent swirl of strings. The track extends the XXL house vibe of their 2022 album Paradise Again, and nods to that album’s ambition to lean harder into the genre that the trio were so influenced by that they in fact name themselves after it.

Jon Hopkins, “part ii – palace/illusion“

Following his 2021 album Music For Psychedelic Therapy (the intention of which was stated right there in the title), English maestro Jon Hopkins returns with an album so deep and soothing that it could very well be used for the same purpose. “Designed,” Hopkins says, “to reconnect you to the deepest part of yourself,” Ritual is subtle, deep and often profound, with the project first sparking to life in 2022 when Hopkins was commissioned to work on an immersive experience, Dreammachine, that set the celestial sonic and visual aesthetic for the eight-track Ritual. The album is out now on Domino Records.

Caribou, “Come Find Me”

Other DJs might party harder, but is anyone having more fun that Caribou? The artist brings the playfulness that’s always defined the Canadian artist’s visual aesthetic to the video for his latest, “Come Find Me,” which finds a dancer in a tracksuit and oversized Snaith mask dancing alone in settings that include the bus, a city sidewalk and an open field. (Watch for a cameo from Snaith himself at the end.) The track itself is warm, gently building IDM — in other words, classic Caribou — and comes from the artist’s sixth studio album, Honey, coming Oct. 4 on Merge Records.

Andy C & Becky Hill, “Indestructable”

As drum ‘n’ bass extends its position on the U.K. charts, two of the genre’s key players link for the predictably walloping “Indestructible,” which gets an official release today on Astralwerks but dates back almost ten years, when Andy C first included an early version in his sets. With Hill possessing one of the defining voices of the genre and Andy C being one of its architects, the result is an acutely powerful meeting of the mninds, with Hill’s lyrics pointing to the success of genre itself.

“’How did we end up here, look how far we’ve come,’ say it all,” Andy C says. “It sums up my relationship with DnB, how popular the genre is right now as well as how huge Becky’s career is. It’s just so magical.”

Related Images: