- Despina strips their sound down for a politically charged slow burning club banger.
- There’s an urgency to Despina’s music. Their basslines struggle for air like swimmers fighting a riptide while claustrophobic vocal loops battle with contorted melodies—it’s somewhere between hyperpop euphoria and haunted techno comedown. “Lo Tech Hi Life,” the highlight from their latest EP, Fire From Heat, starts with a similar force. A robotic vocal repeats over a barrage of hand drums and slanted synths. Halfway through, Despina breaks the track down into a groovy house tune that swaggers along at a swung 125 BPM. As they build the track back up, the vocal line comes in even more forcefully, its repeated refrain, “to dream of” becoming meditative and hopeful. Written as a response to the exponential increases in anti-trans legislation and violence, Despina’s usual club potency is reshaped into a political rallying cry.
