Truth In My Steps

Few residents carry the Ibizan underground in their bones quite like Seb Zito. The East Londoner has anchored FUSE — the Amnesia residency-turned-institution he shares with Enzo Siragusa and Archie Hamilton — for the best part of a decade, and Truth In My Steps is his long-awaited debut album: eleven tracks, out on Edible, Eats Everything’s label, as the imprint’s first LP proper, and Ibiza Spotlight’s April Album of the Month. A career milestone in the truest sense, it traces a line from the UK’s rave roots to the Ibiza dance floor.

The album’s real subject is British club culture itself. Zito grew up in East London at the tail end of rave’s first wave, and the record is a love letter to the sounds that shaped him: hardcore’s stabs, jungle’s breakbeats, dubstep’s bottom-end pressure and, above all, garage’s irresistible swing. The lineage is worn lightly, though — rather than pastiche, he folds each influence into his own warm, bass-led house sound, so the history lesson never feels like revision.

Opener Mission FM sets the tone, two-step drums skipping beneath dubby stabs and the ghost of pirate-radio static, whilst Got That Vibe locks into a chugging, heads-down groove built for the late-night hours FUSE made famous. 2am Lover is the record’s heart: Black Coco’s soulful vocal floats over a tender, half-lit arrangement, its three minutes a masterclass in restraint. One Finger Skank, meanwhile, delivers exactly what its title promises — a cheeky, organ-led garage bounce that’s impossible to stand still to.

Elsewhere, Notting Hill brings carnival season to mind with steel-pan colours and loose percussion, What’s This Seb? finds Zito dropping a playful spoken refrain over tough, swung drums, and Charlie’s Gaff captures the sweaty intimacy of a house party in its low-slung bassline and hands-in-the-air breakdown. Closer Let It Never Go ends on a sentimental high, all warm pads and rolling rhythm — an apt summary of an artist who’s built a career on never letting the feeling drop.

Truth In My Steps is a confident, affectionate debut from a producer finally given the space to stretch. It hangs together as a coherent listen from front to back, yet every track stands alone as a club tool — a balance many veterans of Zito’s vintage never manage. House music has waited a long time for Seb Zito’s album; on this evidence, it was worth every minute of the wait.