trickpony make club music that seems to have slipped out after closing time. The kick drums remain, the bass still carries weight, but on 24/7 Heaven everything around them has become strangely private: voices hover near the ear, breaks drag their heels and synthesisers bloom in the gaps.
The trio brings together producers Mike Midnight and Roza Terenzi with Helsinki-based vocalist and producer Maria Korkeila. Their second record follows 2024's Pillow Talk and sharpens a useful contradiction in their music. They understand the mechanics of dance music, yet they keep refusing its demand for constant forward motion.
That makes 24/7 Heaven less a revival exercise than a record about tempo and atmosphere. Trip hop is an obvious coordinate, but the six tracks keep moving sideways into dub, downtempo electronics, pop and drum & bass. Ripple opens with breakbeats that feel loose rather than frantic, while Heart2Heart lets its melodic details hover over a heavy, patient foundation.
The record works because its softness never becomes decorative.
On Angel, space is treated almost as an instrument. Vocal fragments appear against restrained percussion and low-end pressure, leaving enough air for every delayed sound to register. No/Direction pushes that economy further: rather than filling the arrangement, trickpony let individual elements arrive, hang and disappear. It is music built from withholding.
That approach places the trio in an interesting corner of contemporary electronic music. The language of 1990s downtempo has become newly available to producers raised inside faster club ecosystems, where breakbeats, trance textures and bass music already coexist without much concern for old genre borders. trickpony use that freedom without turning 24/7 Heaven into a collage of references. The six tracks share one physical environment: dim, bass-heavy and intimate.
Trick Trick is particularly good at showing how the group handles rhythm. Percussion keeps shifting under layers of synthesis rather than settling into a clean loop, creating movement without obvious escalation. Then Memphis Light closes the record by loosening the frame further, bringing drum & bass motion into a psychedelic electronic landscape.
The record is released through Berlin label Step Ball Chain, with music credited to Michael Gunson, Maria Korkeila and Katie Campbell, mastering and cutting by Marco Pellegrino at Analogcut and artwork by Nicola Tirabasso. Those concrete club-world details matter: 24/7 Heaven is not ambient music wearing a breakbeat costume. Its restraint comes from people who know what a dancefloor expects and are interested in what happens when you deny it the obvious release.
