Marcel Winatschek

The Drop Is All Rusko Owes You

Rusko—Christopher Mercer—was the kind of dubstep producer who understood that the genre was never really about subtlety. Somebody to Love borrows a title loaded with romantic expectation and promptly ignores all of it; what arrives instead is bass architecture, a chopped vocal that dangles warmth just long enough to snatch it back, and a drop engineered for rooms with bad acoustics and good sightlines. It’s a love song the way a car crash is a slow dance. I was into it anyway.