• W&W return to progressive house
• Catchy melody and vocal sample
• Quick release since premiere
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With the amount of collaboration in the EDM industry, it’s honestly quite a surprise that Nicky Romero and W&W have not released a collaboration between themselves.
That changed very recently, with the release of their joint single ‘Ups & Downs’, only a short while after its premiere at Nicky Romero’s Ultra 2019 set.
W&W are notorious for delaying their releases for years on end, and many of our favorite W&W singles, including Komodo (with Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike x Steve Aoki), have yet to see the light of day, more than three years after their premiere. The fact that this was debuted at Nicky’s set as an unknown ID, and released only two weeks later, seems to hint at the influence that Nicky had over the release, but still is a testament to W&W’s efforts to stop with this late release mentality.
The track starts off with an extremely catchy, pitched up vocal sample, coming from none other than HICARI, an unsung duo who have co-written a ton of the hits that you hear on the radio. A true big-room break with wide, melodic synths enters the mix, before your standard progressive house drop, in a pattern that strong>repeats again in the second half of the song.
W&W are also famous for their trademark bigroom style and sound design, which is filled with vocal samples, crisp, high leads and punchy basses. Notably, this tune lacks a specific bigroom drop, gearing more towards Nicky Romero’s sphere of influence in progressive house. W&W have not done progressive house since tunes like The One back in 2015, and it certainly is refreshing to see them to return to progressive house. While one could potentially make the case that Nicky Romero did the majority of
the work on this track, considering its genre and style in general, certain W&W elements have definitely found their way into this tune. The introduction of the melody begins with high-end boosted leads characteristic of the duo,
and vocal chops in the drop seem to be their input. The basses in the drop are reminiscent of some of their happy hardcore tunes (The Light, Long Way Down), which is quite interesting to hear in progressive house.
Indubitably, the last part of the second drop has the signature phat W&W lead in it. In fact, it seems to me that W&W worked on their forte of the nuances of sound
design, while Nicky worked on the melody, the arrangement and the organic elements such as the vocals and the guitar. Ideally, this is what collaborations should be – two artists working together to balance each others’ weaknesses with each others’ strengths.
W&W began their foray into EDM in the melodic side of trance, and given that this song sees them return to melody-driven production under their main alias, hopefully, this is a sign of things to come from this project in the near future. Nicky Romero &
W&W have definitely done a good job on this one, it isn’t a tune that’ll exactly go down as one of the best that either has produced. While we can’t expect such quality from any artist so consistently, I must admit it was slightly disappointing for me at first when I heard the names behind this tune. Nevertheless, it’s definitely a feel-good progressive house tune that will be on repeat for quite a while.
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