- Retro hardgroove techno made with flair and finesse by one of Mexico's rising dance music stars.
- Techno has been getting harder and faster over the past five years. This trend is partly fueled by a resurgence of interest in genres like hardstyle, trance and gabber, but another retro subgenre is bubbling up to the surface again: hardgroove. Now, hardgroove never really went away—Ben Sims has been running a label with that name since the late '90s—but it's being picked up by a younger generation in an unprecedented way. If you're not familiar with the genre, you'll recognize it when you hear it, but I usually describe it to friends as "bongo techno." This is fast, dense music with layered drums and a lot of hand percussion, like if early tech house took copious mephedrone.
Monterrey, Mexico producer Regal 86 has burst onto the techno scene with a series of jaw-droppingly consistent releases, each focused on a brisk, old-school style of techno that occasionally veers into hardgroove. You get the vibe that he could make this stuff in his sleep, and even that would still be top-shelf work. With his latest album, La Onda, he delivers an arsenal of hardgroove that feels like a milestone for this new wave.
Even at its most functional, there's a verve to Regal86's music that you just can't fake. La Onda launches into its first techno track proper, "Move Ahead", with nothing more than the fundamentals: a tight groove, the barest hint of a vocal grunt and what sounds like some brass. Most of the album continues like this, but each cut has its own personality, and despite the thicket of percussion on each track—this kind of techno tends to fog up windows, unlike more spacious and detailed kinds—melody and mood still shine through. "Good Hit" is humid and sweaty, while the title track, light-footed and smeared in '70s funk, shines beneath a cloudy disco ball.
Melodic leads vary from the sound of a dreamlike sitar on "Ghetto Fleiva"—one of the LP's most dynamic tracks, which opens with drums that cascade like a flurry of Chun-Li kicks, before developing into a tidal wave of sound—to gleaming chrome chord progressions. My favourite cut has to be "Groove Biddy Bye." With its seasick zig-zagging bassline, it sounds like a particularly evil circuit party you could imagine, bordering on the parodic. But it has a distinct gravitational pull, finished off with a dub techno touch that gives it that je ne sais quoi. And amid the torrent of grooves like this, there's the occasional respite, like the slinky trip-hop instrumental "Skit," to let off the pressure just a little. It has the same effect as walking into the club bathroom for a quick breather.
La Onda is distinctly retro, but in the way that music trends work, it's also extremely current. Hardgroove is popular again because the sound is immediately pleasurable, and it also signposts an era of dance music associated with freedom, good times and a certain kind of hardness that didn't try to be cartoonishly evil. This is a genre with a long and rich history across the world—just check out DJ Shufflemaster's recent reissue on Tresor—but you'd do well to start with Regal86, whose innate understanding and appeal of its mechanics makes him sound like an old techno head in the very best way.
Tracklist01. Intro (La Onda)
02. Move Ahead
03. Good Hit
04. Running Foo
05. La Onda
06. Skit
07. Ghetto Fleiva
08. Peligroso
09. Psyck-odelic
10. Just Another Chords
11. Groove Biddy Bye
12. Ghetto Fleiva (O.G. Club Mix)