Baltra
In the Afterglow
96 and Forever
Lo-fi house has been the butt of many jokes over the past decade—it certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that so many of the producers adopted silly, tongue-in-cheek monikers—but there’s no denying those artists’ ability to fashion a quality hook, even in those moments where they relied on random YouTube clips as source material. Baltra was part of that cohort, and though he never had a silly name and long ago transcended the aesthetic trappings of lo-fi house, his ability to craft a danceable earworm not only remains intact, but if the NYC producer’s new In the Afterglow EP is any indication, it’s arguably stronger than ever. Musically speaking, the record is deeply rooted in the UK hardcore continuum, and the post-dubstep sounds of the late 2000s and early 2010s in particular (e.g. shuffling garage rhythms, wobbly basslines, cooing R&B vocal snippets), but Baltra has found a way to distill those sounds into potent, pop-adjacent nuggets that feel as vibrant on the 12th listen as they do on the first.