I love drum n bass. I especially love drum n bass when I'm not expecting it, which is the experience I had when I started listening to let's love ourselves, which for some reason I had assumed to be an ambient release. The opening moments of i am back home, the first track, supported this idea. Some dreamy Eno-esque synths start things off, but it doesn't take too long for the beat to drop and the album to reveal itself. There's a lot to love here. The breakbeat is noisy and distorted, vocal samples glitch and mangle, and all the while that ambient synth pad bends in the background and sounds as ethereal as it does unsettling.
It's a great start to the album, and what's fun is the opening trifecta of tracks keeps upping the ante. The second track, i gotta get outta here, is notably more aggressive than the opener, with its heavy bass synth and filtered kick sounds, where plan 33 pushes things even further, playing at what feels like double the speed of the tracks before it. It's sick as all hell.
It would have been fun to see how far egodystoni could push it, but it was probably the sensible decision to bring things down a bit for the surprisingly poppy You Can D I E. Poppy but still pretty weird, I should clarify. I love this one. I love the vocals. I love the way the track pitches down before the drop, and the bass sound during said drop. These tracks are rough enough to be exciting without sounding messy, and that's a pretty impressive balance to strike.
Another highlight for me is the menacing im a real person. It grabs your attention with its opening riff and is just sound evil sounding, and that's not even taking into account the creepy modulated voice that insists they are a real person.
My only issue with the album, really, is that taken as a whole it's a little bit exhausting. While some tracks are meaner than others, it all exists in the same dynamic space - loud, aggressive, and distorted breakbeats. It's not an issue per se but I can imagine some people struggling to get through it.
Still, I had a great time with it and I'd like to hear more from egodystoni.