Kyle Watson Previews Upcoming Album With ‘Keep Control’
- Undrtone Blog
- 54 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Kyle Watson has shared ‘Keep Control’, the second single from his forthcoming album and the latest release through his own No Context Records.
The track follows July’s Body Ocean collaboration ‘Are You The Same’ and offers another indication of where Watson is heading with the project. Already supported by Chris Lake, ‘Keep Control’ draws on the darker, bass-heavy house sound that has long featured in the South African producer’s work.
A rolling low end provides its foundation, with sharp percussion and a stripped-back bassline driving much of the arrangement. Warm chords and sweeping textures gradually open up the track before a breakdown built around repeated vocals and rising tension pulls it back towards the central groove.
The music is only one part of what makes Watson’s forthcoming album interesting. Rather than completing the record behind closed doors and unveiling it through a conventional campaign, he is documenting its creation in real time.
Listeners are being given access to the process as it happens, from early ideas and studio decisions through to finished masters. The approach places transparency and accountability at the centre of the project, with its final shape effectively developing in public.
It is an unusually open way to approach an album from an artist with more than a decade of international touring behind him. Watson has appeared at Coachella, Lollapalooza Brazil and Ultra South Africa, alongside headline dates across North America, Australia and South Africa.
No Context Records has subsequently given him an independent platform through which to develop that sound on his own terms, with the forthcoming album becoming the label’s most substantial expression of that freedom so far. With ‘Are You The Same’ and now ‘Keep Control’, the record is beginning to take shape around the darker end of Watson’s house productions while leaving its wider direction deliberately unresolved.
Kyle Watson
