- Pretty Sneaky returns with four of their most laid-back and confident takes on dubby house.
- When the Pretty Sneaky project began back in 2017, the Banana-emblazoned white labels felt spiritually and sonically akin to releases on labels like SUED., Acido, or Acting Press. They were experiments in dubby, minimal and jazzy house and techno that wafted from spliff-filled studios during the next morning's rush hour. Even by those standards, last year's 6 EP was a new direction. Gone were the underlying grooves, as the project teetered on the verge of becoming a free jazz and dub jam band. This isn't a complaint: the polyrhythmic drums and reverb-heavy soundscapes on that record were some of their best work yet. But on their latest release, Pretty Sneaky steps out of the shadows to turn in one of their most polished records to date.
Pretty Sneaky channels their freewheeling tendencies into a sound less murky and more crisp. The A2 and B1 feel like proper songs with beginnings, middles and ends—well, sort of. Where the drum programming on past Pretty Sneaky records tended towards the skittering and shuffling, the drums on the A2 are precise and deliberate as they dip below house tempos into a slow burn with the chords and bass building into the sort of drug-chug that Lena Willikens would unleash with aplomb.
For those that still like their Pretty Sneaky foggy and ethereal, there's a bit of that too. The A1 has the feel of slowly panning through Pretty Sneaky's back catalogue, with a muffled house rhythm draped with forlorn organ solos and lopsided flutes. The B2 plays it the least straight, as live-sounding drum solos try to break out from a layer of reverb, the aural equivalent of smearing vaseline over the camera lens. Despite that, there's a real brightness to this record, a confidence—maybe a swagger—that feels like Pretty Sneaky stepping out from the shadows.