Lawmaker

Eight years is a long time in electronic music—long enough for a duo’s sound to become a memory, a benchmark, a thing younger producers imitate. For DARKSIDE, the pairing of Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington, those years since 2013’s Psychic have been spent apart, pursuing solo projects and collaborations of wildly different shapes. Lawmaker, their first new music in that stretch, arrives on Matador as a single five-and-a-half-minute statement: the pair picking up exactly where they left off, as though no time has passed at all.

The reunion is immediately audible in the chemistry. Jaar’s production is characteristically dense and tactile—every surface textured, every sound placed with intent—whilst Harrington’s guitar weaves in and out of the mix rather than dominating it. The pair trade space with the confidence of musicians who know each other’s instincts intimately, and the result is a track that feels considered without ever feeling laboured.

Musically, Lawmaker is a motorik psych-jam in the truest sense: a steady, hypnotic four-to-the-floor pulse drives the whole five minutes and forty-nine seconds forward, over which Harrington’s guitar coils and drones and Jaar’s vocal—buried deep in the mix, barely surfacing above the haze—hums like a memory. The bass sits low and unhurried, the drums lock into a relentless, Krautrock-adjacent crawl, and the track builds not through obvious peaks but through slow accumulation, small details rising from the murk on repeated listens.

Best of all, it’s a promise: the pair have hinted that a new album is due later this year, and if Lawmaker is any indication, the wait has been worth it. It’s not a grand comeback statement in the conventional sense—no fanfare, no obvious hook—but it is a deeply confident one, a single that re-establishes DARKSIDE’s singular chemistry in under six minutes and leaves you hungry for more.