Since its inception, Alix Perez’s 1985 Music imprint has carved out a corner of drum & bass where restraint is a virtue: weight over speed, tension over release. The label boss’s latest outing, Untitled Malware, is a collaboration with Belgian stepper Monty, and it pushes that ethos to its most surgical extreme — a single, five-minute-and-41-second track of bleak, stripped-back drum & bass that holds its breath for the entire duration.
The pairing makes sense on paper. Perez has spent years refining a deep, halftime-informed strain of the genre that prizes sub-bass pressure and negative space, whilst Monty has established himself as one of the most exciting names in the 1985 camp, his tracks built on swung, stepped rhythms and the kind of drum work that keeps heads nodding long after the drop. Together they find common ground in the shadows: Untitled Malware opens with little more than a dry, weighty kick and a loop of tightly-cut hats, the kind of arrangement that leaves nowhere to hide.
The drums stay front and centre throughout, but it’s what surrounds them that sells the track. A sub bass creeps in low and ominous, refusing to move far from its root note, whilst distant, reverb-drenched stabs flicker at the edges like signals picked up on a dying radio. There’s no vocal, no melody to speak of — just groove, pressure and a sense of dread that the title leans into knowingly. At the point where a lesser track would drop a wobble or a vocal chop to relieve the tension, Perez and Monty simply strip things back further, letting the beat carry the final stretch alone.
Untitled Malware is not a record for casual listeners; it demands attention and rewards patience. As a one-track single it works as a perfect mission statement for both artists — clinical, restrained and quietly menacing — and a reminder that in a scene increasingly obsessed with spectacle, 1985 Music remains happy to let the drums do the talking.
