Image by Bethany Vargas
Six years ago, Los Angeles producer TOKiMONSTA was diagnosed with a strange and rare brain disease which caused her to temporarily lose her hearing and her ability to perceive music. Two years and two brain surgeries later she mostly re-learnt the process of music making, an exercise which culminated in her 2017 album, Lune Rouge. That saw her key in on her innate pop sensibilities, streamlining the deconstructed electronic hip-hop sound established by 2010’s Midnight Menu. Since then, her sound has evolved towards increasingly more groove inflected pop-house, interpolations of disco and soulful dance music forms that gave rise to last year’s exclusively instrumental Oasis Nocturno. Naked, which features Compton rapper/vocalist Chanel Tres, the first single released by TOKiMONSTA this year. It is a continuation and further exploration into this machine-funk aesthetic, and finds TOKiMONSTA in the throes of her most outright and unashamed retro-pop groove.
Beginning with a slick bass guitar riff and a strut worthy drum beat, Naked rolls into painfully cool house production against Channel Tres’s swagger dripping vocalizations. Tres is a natural fir for TOKiMONSTA’s style, and much of the track becomes built around his icy chic verses. Tres’s vainglorious charisma adds a subtle contemporary edge to Naked, and his “you cool count my cheddah” lyrical pattern is the sort of nonsense hip-pop cadence perfectly engineered to roll effortlessly over TOKiMONSTA’s pumping bass and smooth beats. It’s Naked’s soaring chorus that really propels it into disco-funk nirvana, with euphoric vintage strings and a hand-clap beat that sends it soaring into the mirror-ball stratosphere. Throughout, a modulating synth wave in an ever-so slightly juxtaposing key ebbs and emanates from beneath the percussion, adding a deviantly stylish loucheness to TOKiMONSTA’s layers of retro-kitsch maximalism.
Naked stands as TOKiMONSTA’s total embrace and synthesis of the sounds and motifs she has been toying with across her discography. It also speaks towards her incredible diversity as a producer, and zones in on her often overlooked yet distinct point of view. This brand of technicolour disco formulated for the Valley Girl nonchalance of the Los Angeles strip recalls a poppier and delightfully lowbrow iteration of TOKiMONSTA’s poncier stylistic relatives, Peggy Gou and Jayda G. The hypersatured iconoclash collage of its music video reflects this sort of saccharine energy, and positions Naked as a raucously fun retro-dance cut that will undoubtedly trigger an instant summer house party.
Naked is released on TOKiMONSTA’s own Young Art Records label. Watch the kaleidoscopic music video below.
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