Stuart South, working under the alias P00TA5H — a name that reads like a CAPTCHA and sounds, mercifully, better than it's spelled — has built his single from the scaffolding of three very different decades. Kraftwerk supplies the chassis: cold, mechanical, faintly Teutonic precision. Talk Talk, more curiously, supplies the ghost in the machine, that sense of restraint pulling against the urge to fill every bar. Heaven 17 lends the sheen, the polished synth-pop varnish that keeps the whole thing from collapsing into noise. Layered atop this scaffolding sits a hip-hop skeleton — syncopated, gritty, occasionally swaggering — bolted to EDM's bass weight like a man trying to fit a turbocharger into a Mini.

It mostly works. The opening passage does what good electronic music has always done best: it withholds. South lets a clipped, metallic pulse build tension before the low end arrives, and when it does, it arrives with the kind of aggressive, almost punitive thump that suggests he's spent more time in clubs than his press notes let on. The percussion is where the old-school instincts show through most clearly — there's a dustiness to the drum programming, a refusal to quantise every hit into sterile perfection, that gives the track a pulse rather than a metronome.

This is a record written, produced and mastered alone, in a bedroom, by someone with no apparent interest in outside validation beyond a press release that reads like it was typed in a hurry between shifts. That scrappiness is audible, and not always to the track's detriment. The rawness gives "Electrophobia" a pulse that a major-studio polish job would have sanded away.

Is it the future of electronic music, as the accompanying notes rather boldly claim? No. But it's a perfectly serviceable signpost towards one possible future — one where hip-hop's syncopation, EDM's low-end violence, and the chilly art-pop of 1981 all share a postcode, even if they're still arguing over the rent. Gravesend, for now, has a producer worth watching, provided he learns when to turn the bass down and trust the synths to do the talking.

Promising architecture, overcrowded foundations.