The title track opens the argument. It runs at 134 BPM in F# minor, and the rhythm section is pure UK garage: two-step drums skip and stutter, snares land just behind where your body expects them, and a four-on-the-floor kick holds everything upright. Over that sit stabbing organ bass and a rolling sub that you feel in the sternum before you hear it. This is the lineage of Sammy Virji and PinkPantheress, and also of the Korean pop factories that XG and KiiiKiii have spent the last few years turning into a global export. Onyx stands where those two scenes overlap, and the place turns out to be roomy.<\/p>
The vocal is the hook. A sung, 90s-flavoured riff threads through every section like a bright wire, so familiar by the second chorus that you hum it on the stairs. Around it the delivery shifts gear. The low sing-talk verses are cool, almost bored. Then, in the second half, comes a hard, fast rap verse, and this is the master stroke: the track refuses the drop. Where lesser dance records build to a detonation, *CLOSE* puts its peak in the rapping, a burst of syllables where the bass might have swelled. Korean phrases are folded into the hooks, never as garnish, always as rhythm. Then the song simply stops. No fade, no climax, just a door swinging shut.<\/p> That image is the point. Every title on the EP is a word with two meanings, and each song lives in the gap between them. “Close” means near, and it means shut. The lyric is a taunt on its face: everybody gets this far with her, and nobody gets further. Two verses play it as swagger. Then the bridge flips the lock. She is not guarding the door; she is inside, listening to it close, and she did not do it. It is a startling turn, the boast revealed as a bruise, and it lands harder on a dancefloor record than it would on a ballad, because the beat never softens to let you feel sorry for her.<\/span><\/p> Across the six songs the EP tracks control in three stages: first as a boast, then as a performance, then as something happening to her. It is a tidy arc, and the wordplay could have curdled into concept-album fussiness. It does not, because the tunes carry the thinking and the thinking never slows the tunes. The earlier bass house single “LOADED” now reads as the opening statement of confidence that *CLOSE* quietly picks apart.<\/span><\/p> An obvious irony sits underneath all this. A generated voice singing about autonomy being taken away, about things done to her without her say, invites uncomfortable readings. Novaix has not dodged them, and the record is richer for it. Whether you hear a canny joke, a sincere metaphor or both, the writing earns its ambiguity.<\/span><\/p> *CLOSE* is a sleek, strange, thoroughly danceable little record, and it ends the way the best nights do: abruptly, with the lights coming on and everyone wondering what, exactly, they just felt.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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