July 20, 2023 at PDT
Salvation
It was midway through writing a lyric for their fourth album that Gorgon City pulled out the word “salvation” and realized it encompassed everything they had been trying to express. “‘Salvation’ came up and we thought it was a strong, powerful concept for the album title,” Matt Robson-Scott, one half of the dance duo from London, tells Apple Music. “The music industry was hit so hard by the pandemic and every time we got into the studio with someone or when we were chatting to people while we were on the road, everyone was just so gassed to be back together and be able to do the thing we love. The music and the coming together again was our salvation.”
Robson-Scott and Kye Gibbon make Salvation a celebration of everything that’s passed through Gorgon City’s sonic realm over the past decade, at the same time as pushing things forward. It takes in euphoric, heady house, club bangers, epic drops, and hypnotic bassline swoops—music made by people used to seeing an exhilarated crowd in front of them—but there’s also contemplative moments too, dynamic shifts into darker breakbeats and a harder garage sound. “We’ve come a long way in the last 10 years,” adds Gibbon. “With every album, we’re constantly trying out new things, experimenting with new sounds, being inspired by what we’re hearing on the road.” Robson-Scott and Gibbon guide us through their dance opus, track by track.
“Wreckage” (feat. Julia Church)
Kye Gibbon: “We felt like this was a strong one to open with. It was one of the tracks that was one of the easier ones to make. We’re big fans of [London-based singer-songwriter] Julia Church’s work. We messaged her asking if she wanted to collaborate and she said she was down. We had this beat lying around and sent it over. She sent it back within a few days and it sounded pretty much complete. We’re producers and sometimes we’re trying to figure out, ‘OK, what else can we add to this song?’ But it just felt like it didn’t need any more doing to it, so we left it quite stripped-back and just let the song do the talking.”
“Voodoo”
Matt Robson-Scott: “This is probably the biggest sing-along vocal from the album. It’s infectious and hypnotic and catchy, and that’s why we released it as the first single. We also tested it out early on in the clubs when it was still a demo and the reaction was just insane, everyone was asking about it. It had such an amazing energy to it. The first demo sounds quite similar to how the track ended up. We didn’t add much more to it—we added a couple more layers of the bass and stuff.”
“Heartless” (feat. RAHH)
KG: “This was one of the more difficult tracks to make. We knew it was such a powerful song, we wanted the production to do it justice. We got to a point where we were overthinking it, adding stuff and then thinking, ‘No, this isn’t right,’ and starting from scratch. The drum sounds are a bit of a motif of the album—with ‘Heartless,’ ‘Voodoo,’ and ‘Wreckage.’ It’s going back to our roots listening to garage, jungle, and drum ’n’ bass growing up. That was a real part of the concept of this album, going back to our roots.”
MR-S: “This album has got that energy from our older tracks but with new vibes, more current and more developed songwriting.”
“Pose” (with Nez)
KG: “We almost never do nighttime sessions—this might’ve been the first one we’ve ever done. It was really late. Normally, when we’re on tour, we’re so knackered, we’re like calling it a day at 6pm or something. But this was really cool. Nez [Chicago producer and vocalist] is such a sick guy. It was the first time I’d ever met him, and he’s just got such a cool energy about him. It was a nice, relaxed, easy session. We started the track completely from scratch. We like to normally have something very raw, basic to go off, but he was like, ‘No, let’s just jam something out from scratch.’ This is definitely one of the more clubby tracks on the album. We feel like we can play the original in any club sets. It’s quite a tough track.”
“Lost & Found” (feat. Drama)
KG: “I live in Chicago and [R&B/dance duo] Drama are based there as well. I’ve done quite a few sessions over the last couple of years with them, and they’re amazing to work with because they’re quite different than any other people we’ve worked with. They’re normally quite insular. They do their thing and they don’t really invite outsiders into their space, so it felt like an honor to do that. It’s crazy seeing how they work. They work completely differently to anyone else I’ve ever collaborated with. You can tell that they’re a band.”
“A Lot Like Heaven” (feat. Julia Church)
MR-S: “This one was written in London. There was a session with Tim Powell, who’s a songwriter and producer, and Julia. She came to the session with Låpsley. We went in there with some basic chord ideas and gave it to Tim and just let him get to it, writing with them. By the end of the day, they’d used our basis of a track and written this amazing song, it really blew us away. They’d turned it into a slightly different sounding track as well, added a new section, a new chord progression. Then we stripped it all back again and reproduced it and turned it into something more dark and a bit more emotional. That was the first time we’ve ever really let another producer take our original idea, write a song with it and then give it back to us to remake it again into an original track. If you listen to the melodies in the verses, you can hear Låpsley’s influence in there. I’m a massive fan of her songwriting.”
“City of Angels” (feat. Jelani Blackman)
MR-S: “While they were making ‘A Lot Like Heaven,’ I was in the other studio recording [London singer/producer/rapper] Jelani Blackman doing the vocals for ‘City of Angels.’ Both songs were written simultaneously on the same day. They’re completely different, though. Kye wasn’t there that day. I sent him the basic demo and he transformed it into this mad jungle-y vibe.”
KG: “I wanted to experiment a bit. The vocal and the whole vibe sounded like it could really work on a breakbeat track. We’ve done that quite a lot on this record. It’s definitely deviated from the four-kick-drum rhythm a lot on this album. Again, that’s us going back to our breakbeat roots, all the music we listened to in the ’90s.”
“Remember the Days” (feat. Selah Sol)
MR-S: “This took a while. Lyric-wise, it was very concentrated on the fact of getting through some dark times, getting through the pandemic, and we wanted to emphasize that through the production. I think we probably made about three or four different versions of it before we got it right. We tried a couple more banging versions, and they weren’t sitting right with the emotion of the song. Then we went into a deeper lane, which is a bit more like Afro-house and the bass is really deep and warm. Once we did that, it felt right.”
“Gasoline” (feat. Santino Le Saint)
KG: “This was at the end of a writing week and we were all a bit burned out, trying out all these little ideas and nothing was really working. Then [London singer-songwriter] Santino was like, ‘Oh shit, sorry, I’ve got to leave in an hour.’ We’d got nothing done, so we were like, ‘OK, why don’t we just do something fun, just do a fun hook and make a club record out of it?’ Suddenly, with the pressure of him needing to go, we just put some chords down and jammed out, riffed out this one hook and we were like, ‘Yeah, amazing, done, see you, bye!’ With [2021 album] Olympia, we seemingly had forever to do it because we were in lockdown. With this, we were touring, we’ve got deadlines, working on a track on planes, in hotel rooms. Sometimes the pressure of knowing that you haven’t got much time can really force you to be creative because you’re not second-guessing yourself.”
“Should’ve Known”
KG: “This one was a fun one to make. It’s maybe the only track that didn’t come from one of the sessions. It’s based on a vocal sample rather than something that we wrote in those sessions. It’s such a deep emotive track but then the second drop just comes out of nowhere and slaps you in the face. I remember doing that part of the track on a plane, realizing that this track needed a bit of a surprise in there somewhere.”
MR-S: “It starts off really chill but at the second drop it turns into this monster. We played it as an early demo and it just went off in the club. It was like, ‘Wow, this tune is a banger.’ That’s why it’s a nice way to end the album as well, because you get that sort of emotion when it starts but then at the end you get a bit of a blowout. It finishes on a big moment.”
10 Tracks
