jg

It’s funny to think that when Jacques Greene started making hazy, dub-inflected house music for Night Slugs in the ’10s, some critics wondered why a producer from Montreal had wound up launching his career through a London label. “My best friends at the time were people I spoke to on the internet, people I was sending tracks back and forth to,” Greene once told Resident Advisor. “To me that never felt unnatural.” These days, situations like that are commonplace. Regional sounds will never be as localized as they were before SoundCloud, YouTube, and Bandcamp. Today, cross-regional pollination is the norm. DJ K, a producer who lives on the outskirts of São Paulo, released his last Brazilian funk album on Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes. Los Angeles-based Skrillex is sending files of New York jerk to Upper West Side native xaviersobased.

Greene’s music still belongs more to the futuristic, R&B-inspired club of London’s underventilated venues than to any particular strain from Montreal. His gift is in picking out the perfect vocal sample (though not necessarily the most obscure one), pitching it up to a UK garage warble, and letting it softly talk to you over flying, life-affirming synths. His shuffly beats aren’t quite downtempo, but their laid-back, melancholic builds have typically been best suited for environments that offer the space to fully absorb their nuanced emotions. When he has gotten close to writing a true dancefloor banger, like on this year’s flip of Lumidee’s “Never Leave You,” he’s always found a way to skirt around peak time, looping the most earnest parts of the lyrics and tethering them to wispy ambient textures. When the drums drop, it still feels like your mind could float away.

Now, more than a decade into his career, Greene drops JG, his club album through and through, and he recruits the help of his friends to pick up the energy, committing to turbo-charged arpeggios matched with powerful low ends. He opens the album with the roaring “Closer,” a collaboration with DJ Boring that leads with a skippy UKG beat before disappearing in a show of neon lights. On “Everyone” a joint with SEES00000, and “What You Say,” a collaboration with umru, layers of glossy synths are jettisoned into walloping drums that almost have the punch of techno.

The results are most effective when the lyrics are tight and embody the colorful feelings that Greene’s music often evokes. Sølv’s contribution to “Waiting” (“What you waiting for?/Crave me/Make me/Crazy, just a little”) is catchy in a way that you don’t realize until you find yourself humming it later on; her woozy vocals meet the song’s frosty melodies as though they were sprung from the same source. Greene is a sampler first, and a good one, but original hooks haven’t always been his strong suit. On the weaker end of his lyrical offerings, a song like “Time to Go,” featuring CFCF, revolves around the line, “I know, I know, I know/It’s time for me to go,” and a delivery so beige that you hope, to no avail, for a more exciting hook when the beat drops.

Just when you think Greene’s music is so pretty that it has reached a point of being cloying, there are those deep, rattling wubs again, shaking everything blissfully out of place. “Two” makes the strongest argument for Greene’s place in a sweat-soaked club, pairing flurrying seraphic vocals with towering, multi-layered synths and jungle breaks that could shatter the dancefloor on a hefty soundsystem. It carries all the fragile melodies of his most beautiful works, with a new power—that of a producer who wants to see heads banging in the crowd at 2 in the morning.