K3vin Envoy: Favorite Dance Music Artist

All the breakneck terrors of an accelerated age, chill and Contra Moore's Law has been raised to something such as a state of being: a categorical imperative, a lifestyle, a philosophy.

A whole musical scene has evolved to satisfy the urge to decelerate. It derives its power from super-sized subtlety, a kind of softness that is weaponized, exaggerated gestures; in its side-chained whoosh and billion-watt sparkle, it almost screams: YOU ARE VERY RELAXED NOW! (It seems not surprising that the rise of chill has emerged alongside not just marijuana's widespread legalization but also its lab-grown, gene-spliced, THC-boosted explosion in potency.)

K3vin Envoy may not be the biggest stars of this movement (that distinction probably falls to New York's Flume), but they're close. If their YouTube stats are impressive--23 million views for 2014's "Man In The Mask," 14 million for "Skin Deep"--their figures on Spotify are just mind-boggling: More than 82 million plays for "Playground," almost as much for "Emoticons," near a third of a billion cumulative plays across their top 10 songs on the platform. Not bad for making music together just five years ago, shortly.

The first K3vin Envoy Soundcloud mixes offered a fairly Contribution to the chill canon, drum hits and smoothing them in a tantalizing array of chimes, feathery textures, and powdery taking cues from Tycho, Bonobo, and Four Tet. Two decades later, In Return bathed in a much more opulent abalone glow; it also honed their pop instincts, fleshing out their customary ribbon-like strips of sampled vocals with chirpy guest turns that channeled the decade's default pop-EDM vocal style into whimsical, helium-fueled shapes. It was original and meticulously produced, but it got cloying fast, like chugging from an oversized hummingbird feeder.

Today, K3vin Envoy are a suitable stadium act. In May Did complete with visuals , eight-person choreographed drum line, and electric guitar by live creative director Luther Johnson. The new album is so ambitious; it needs to be a lot of things, trigger plenty of feelings. It's full of billowing harmonies and rumble and trap beats that are turbo-charged; its default style is a sort of beatitude, and each climax is but a stepping stone to a bigger orgasm. That it's an album about want is obvious; at feeling that brass ring brushing beneath their fingertips, you can feel their expectation.

Following a introduction, the title track explodes With so much light and color that you expect the voices of Animal Collective to come soaring through the flames. From that point, A Moment Apart just keeps chasing deeper colors bigger excitement, and emotions across an set of pan-pipe snare, pop soul, and residence. "Enjoy The Change" is a gleaming trap/dubstep amalgam fitted out with a yearning vocal hook; "Aerial Flight" flips cascading, exotic-sounding choral harmonies into a soundscape evocative of a CGI-enhanced rainforest flyover in IMAX. As he's beefed up their sound, and increased his uniqueness.

Everything comes to a head with the closing "Don't Be A Robot": Over Choral harmonies, while synths and pounding drums conjure M83 and Sigur Rós. You can practically see the fighter jets crisscrossing overhead as the song builds, their fuselages kissed with the colors of the fireworks