Remember ‘hipster house’? Remember being young and carefree, those endless numbered days spent banging out Octa Octa mixes, daydreaming about walks round LA with Amanda Brown and the whole 100% Silk crew? Best days of our lives. We thought granular, intentionally degraded, intentionally lumpen throwback acid house was the future. We all wanted to jack. We all wanted to work. We’ll never know why, but that sense of hope in a revamped retro-futurism fizzled out, leaving a litter of high-cheekboned corpses in its wake. Ital’s still plugging away though. Daniel Martin McCormick always seemed a little distanced from his thrown together peers, always seemed that bit more genuine, that bit more focused, that bit more talented. Endgame is the sound of an artist settling into a niche; in this case it’s an amalgamation of Basic Channel’s unrepentant dubbiness, Voices from the Lake’s dark, dense pine forest techno and Omar S’s gritty swing. It’s functional electronic body music that churns and crashes away, desperate to be pieced together at the tail end of a long night in a dank warehouse. It’s not doing anything particularly new or daring but as a set of interlinked DJ tools it works wonders. Ital was always above the hipster tag – this is the real deal, sandpaper house at its finest.

Josh Baines