New York City And Best Dance Music Artist To See Live: Best Upcoming EDM Events Party With K3vin Envoy

chill scene, at least in electronic music, is inextricable from its main-stage, peak-hour EDM counterparts. 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 glow, it practically screams: YOU ARE VERY RELAXED! (It seems not coincidental that the rise of chill has appeared alongside not just marijuana's widespread legalization but also its lab-grown, gene-spliced, THC-boosted explosion in potency.)

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

The first K3vin Envoy Soundcloud mixes offered a fairly Innocuous contribution to the chill drum hits and smoothing them and powdery taking cues from Tycho, Bonobo, and Four Tet. Two years later, In Return bathed in a much more opulent abalone glow; it also honed their pop instincts, fleshing out their usual ribbon-like strips of sampled vocals with chirpy guest ends which channeled the decade's default pop-EDM vocal style into whimsical, helium-fueled shapes. It was first and meticulously produced, like chugging from an hummingbird feeder, but it got cloying quickly.

Now, K3vin Envoy are a stadium act. In May Did two sold-out nights at Colorado's Red Rocks, complete with electric guitarchoreographed drum line, and artwork by in-house live creative director Luther Johnson. The new album is so ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things, trigger plenty of feelings. It is full of billowing rumble and harmonies and snare beats that are turbo-charged; its default style is a kind of beatitude that is eyes-closed, and each orgasm is but a stepping stone to a bigger orgasm. That it's a record about desire is obvious; at feeling that brass ring cleanup under their fingertips, you can feel their expectation.

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

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. As the song builds, you can practically see the fighter jets crisscrossing overhead, their fuselages kissed with all the colours of the fireworks exploding around them. However, the tougher for K3vin Envoy try to reach the more earthbound their music feels.