The result is "Mouth 2 Mouth", a drum and bass track running at a brisk 170bpm, and the most honest piece of dance music to escape a bedroom studio this year. Its creator describes it as a "kick-ons party for one", which is as good a genre tag as any. It is a resuscitation in the literal sense: the crowd's energy, absorbed for hours, breathed back out through the speakers in the small hours, mouth to mouth.

It would be easy to assume such a origin story guarantees a scrappy demo, all lo-fi bravado and good intentions. Nothing of the sort. The track carries the urgency of something made while the memory is still hot, before sensible thoughts about mixing, tidiness and reasonable behaviour have had a chance to arrive. DEHUSSLAR has said the usual rules of music-making "went out the window" on this project, and the evidence suggests he watched them fall with some satisfaction. At 170bpm the pulse is relentless, the sort that turns spines into pistons and makes a Tuesday-morning commute feel like an insult. Here is a producer who understands that a drop is a promise to a crowd, and that promise should be kept with interest.

What lifts it above the merely functional is its sheer appetite. Drum and bass is a genre often accused of coldness, of engineers showing off to other engineers. "Mouth 2 Mouth" is warm-blooded. It is music by someone who was in the crowd rather than merely above it, who knows what a thousand strangers feel when the bass lands, and who wants everyone else to feel it too. Call it life force, call it vitality, call it a very good time. The producer's own phrase, giving himself "more life and energy" and passing it along, is disarmingly modest for something this ambitious.

Context helps. This is the second single from the forthcoming album *Watermelon and Dick, The Festival Album*, a title that promises either genius or a restraining order and probably delivers both. The first single, "II VII V DUB", a hybrid of trap and dubstep at 140bpm, entered the Aotearoa Hot Top 20 Singles chart at #15. "Mouth 2 Mouth" has arrived at #6, which suggests New Zealand's dancefloors are paying attention. A producer who can swing from half-time swagger to breakneck jungle-flavoured propulsion within two releases is showing range, and doing it without the po-faced genre-hopping that usually accompanies such ambition.

He also keeps a motto worth stealing. "Passion isn't enough, you have to be obsessed," a friend told him at an art exhibition, and the line has clearly lodged somewhere behind his ribs. Obsession is audible here. Nobody restarts a night at 3am, alone, unless the night refuses to end inside them.

Whether the album can sustain this fever remains to be seen, and nobody should demand that it does. For now, "Mouth 2 Mouth" stands as a gloriously stubborn refusal to let the lights come up. Put it on loud, preferably somewhere with a low ceiling and poor judgement.