“Vocoder” Floating Points

Over the past 13 years, Sam Shepherd’s work as Floating Points has oscillated between dancing and dreaming. If some of his earliest releases reveled in the whirling motion of the mirrorball—tracks like “Vacuum Boogie” and “People’s Potential” felt like love letters to a vintage strain of Detroit-bred electro-funk—most of his records since then have refused to pick a side between the club and the chillout room; knotty rhythmic experiments go hand in hand with enveloping analog synth sweeps.

But not always: Shepherd’s music dissolved into pure ambience with last year’s Promises, an album-length collaboration with veteran free-jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. His new single “Vocoder” snaps back to the opposite end of the spectrum. Its groove is more insistent than even the punchiest tracks on his 2019 album Crush; it might be the heaviest thing he’s done.

The song begins demurely enough, with flickering, carefully filtered synth chords that, given the title, sound like they might be the fruit of a vocoder—a tool that fuses vocal intonation with electronic sound. But tightly wound hi-hats promise an imminent payoff, and when the drums and bass kick in, they’re absolutely ginormous, a walloping UK garage groove seemingly designed to stress-test the burliest sound systems. Beyond the drums and the splashing synths, there’s barely anything else to this pointillistic club workout—just a hiccupping vocal sample on the offbeats, which Shepherd dubs out to disorienting effect, hard-panning from channel to channel and fading up the gain until the signal runs red. It’s an unmistakable anthem and a surefire floor-filler—and an affirmation of faith that this year, finally, we’re going to get to dance again.