Let Them

JJ makes music that sounds like it was recorded in a room where everyone was pretending not to be in love. The Gothenburg duo works in this specific zone of melancholy—too spare to be emotional, too emotional to be ambient. Hip-hop bones, ghostly vocals, samples that shouldn’t work but do. JJ n°2 did something to me when I first heard it in 2009 that I still haven’t entirely explained to myself.

"Let Them" sits in that same register—the kind of track that doesn’t arrive so much as accumulate. You put it on when the room is almost dark and you’ve stopped deciding whether you want company or solitude. JJ are very good at that specific liminal state, that pause between wanting something and admitting you want it.

I don’t know what they’re building toward. I’m paying attention anyway.