In the strange, suspended year of 2020, when clubs shut their doors and the world retreated indoors, an anonymous figure began soundtracking the lockdown. DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ self-released Charmed in November, a double album of 31 tracks running close to three hours, and watched it spread entirely by word-of-mouth — passed between friends like a mixtape made specially for you. There is no press photo, no backstory to speak of; just a torrent of maximalist house built from gleefully stolen samples, and an audience who found in it the exact sound of being alive in a strange year.
The approach is shameless and utterly winning. Sabrina’s house is assembled from fragments of radio pop, soap-opera strings and disco-era horns, chopped, looped and drenched in a cheap, fuzzy reverb that suggests everything was recorded in a bedroom on a gloriously overcast afternoon. Title track Charmed rides a four-to-the-floor beat and a descending synth hook that refuses to leave your head, whilst Love Foundation and the nine-minute I Want U 2 Know pile on vocal stabs and handclaps until the whole thing teeters on the edge of collapsing into pure joy.
The album’s length is the point, not the problem. One-minute interludes like After the Fall, Summertime Car-by and By the Pool break up the marathon like adverts for a happier world, and the self-aware This Is the Remix and its wink of a sequel title 2 Long LookIIng Back, Too suggest an artist thoroughly in on the joke. The long-form tracks are where the magic lives: My Baby, I Become Unhinged and the closing pair Charmed Life and End of an Era each stretch past eleven minutes, letting the pulse hypnotise as melody piles upon melody.
Beneath the chaos there is real sentiment. Wedding Night and Forever are absurdly romantic, Still Cool aches with nostalgia, and Down With Love pairs a towering bassline with a vocal that sounds beamed in from a forgotten AM radio station. It is music that feels handmade — imperfect, human and completely free of cynicism — which is precisely why it became the soundtrack of a year spent at home.
Charmed is far too long, and that is exactly what makes it special. It is a record to sink into rather than consume, and it remains a word-of-mouth phenomenon because it sounds like nothing else in house music. For a release with no label, no press machine and no visible artist behind it, that is quite the spell to cast.
