Video game vitality meets hard-hitting experimental club as ARCHANGEL pulls off a grandiose and masterful combo attack

All across the video game, film, and music mediums, there is one thing that can make a masterpiece: a feeling of grandeur. This characteristic allows for epic swells of emotion that will wash through and resonate with an audience. Often a sense of grandeur is achieved through bringing together a number of disparate elements to one confident whole. And this needn't be some epic, dramatic odyssey. Magnificence can be communicated through sharp, pumping dance music as well.

ARCHANGEL unleashes a hefty sonic experience within her debut album. CRITICAL HIT is a project combining the well-arranged and often-hard textures of experimental club music, the genuine danceable style of house and techno and the peaceful ambience one might find in a Mort Garson release. A difficult task but on top of that, ARCHANGEL also evokes flashy video game memories too – most notably in the title and the Dance Dance Revolution-esque artwork. With all this at play in the release, the word “grandeur” feels apt.

Across the record, the pastel glints of synths permeate every nook and cranny, sparkling around the main percussive beat and adding its delicate tune on top of it. The opener and closer HABIBI BREAK and NOT YOUR FINAL FANTASY show this dynamic in clear view, the quaint plucked-string-synth melody glides all around the former song’s morphing IDM/philly club beat and places a twinkling melodic cascade over the drum’s gentle rumble before building up into a heaving rhythm at the very end. 

This atmosphere continues to expand further, with FUSION HA slipping in ballroom culture through the sampling of US dance legends Masters at Work around a spare, yet glimmering synth pad that creates a comforting yet vigorous vogue session, and PK STAR STORM embodies Earthbound’s strongest spell perfectly as the hazy synth flourish circles around the liquid-spilling samples and rapid beat rhythms, creating a star shower that flash its light brightly through its rhythmic energy. 

Despite its mellow presentation, ARCHANGEL doesn’t sacrifice any heart-pumping energy of the album’s varied array of techno, house, and EDM sound palettes. Specifically, songs like PSYREN that starts with humming dreamy voices before the drums begin to rattle and clean vocal samples loop all over it, FINAL BOSS where a typically sinister-sounding Vegeta from Dragonball Z leads us into bombastic, epic swells of dark percussion, and SUB-MISSION with its sub-bass rhythms blast through walls of detuned chiming textures before eventually pulling away the edge and becoming a part of a bright euphoric atmosphere.

The album never shies away from the process of experimentation either. HEY! LISTEN! (FT. SLEEPY HUSTLE) hypnotises by ratcheting up its pitch, throwing the listener off-course ever so slightly as SLEEPY HUSTLE’s minimal humming all across the spacey ambience and amorphous drum beats. OBELISK makes use of its 5-minute runtime as sparkling tech-viscera gives way to a commanding beat, followed up by DIVINE BEAST where an esoteric sense of mysticism is brought to life through a marching beat and tribal samples. Loamy bass thrums from start to finish that call to a feeling of unspeakable wisdom, the kind one would get in the early hours of the morning during a post-rave epiphany.

Underneath that pastel aesthetic that ARCHANGEL rolls over, there’s an energetic rhythm that drives the core of CRITICAL HIT, charging up her sonic inspirations and unleashing them all in a debut release that’s grand and direct in equal measure. Only goes to show that despite her inspirations coming from drastically different mediums, ARCHANGEL knows where to fit them within her constantly colourful music. As a result, she never fails to miss, always landing those critical hits!