Double Cup

Chicago producer Rashad Harden's instrumentals feel like cars hydroplaning toward brick walls – somehow both weightless and brutally powerful. Blending a local style of dance music called footwork with contemporary trap-rap, Double Cup is a dense, dizzying album haunted by soulvocal loops and high-hats tapping out Hail Marys in a kind of frantic Morse code. Between the crisp top layer and blurry sub bass is a silence blacker than the dead of night. Thrilling in five-minute bursts, a little tiring over a 50-minute LP, Rashad gives us a take on minimalism in the no-attention-span era: repetitive, ominous, eerily calm but always threatening to explode.