Skream — the man who, as a teenager in Croydon, more or less single-handedly soundtracked dubstep’s rise with Midnight Request Line — has spent the best part of a decade exploring the other side of the coin. His conversion from bass-heavy peak-time weaponry to loose, swung house and UK garage has been well documented, and Chesters Groove finds him doubling down: it’s the first release on his own IFEEL imprint, and it comes flanked by remixes from Berghain resident Norman Nodge — a neat handshake between Skream’s garage heritage and Berlin techno.
The title track is pure, unhurried floor business. A weighty four-to-the-floor kick sits beneath a springy, off-kilter bassline that skips and stutters like a garage groove dragged into the house domain, while bright stabs and a dubbed-out vocal hook give the seven and a half minutes real forward motion. It’s the sound of a producer enjoying himself — nothing forced, nothing over-arranged, just a locked-in groove that rewards patience.
Chesters Groove launched Skream's IFEEL imprint with remixes from Berghain's Norman Nodge.
Nodge’s pair approach the same source from opposite angles. The Ying Remix stretches things out into a linear, hypnotic techno driver — the garage skip flattened into a steady pulse, the vocal reduced to a ghostly, reverbed whisper over rolling percussion. The Yang Remix, shorter and more direct, snaps the groove back into focus, its stabs sharper and its drums pushed higher in the mix. Taken together they work beautifully as a duo, showing how much mileage a single idea can carry when it’s handled with that kind of restraint.
There’s a pleasing circularity to all of this: dubstep owed its very bones to UK garage, so watching the original’s DNA return to the dancefloor through a Berlin lens feels less like a rebrand than a homecoming. With Chesters Groove, Skream proves his new direction has plenty of gas left in the tank — a confident label debut, and a reminder that the ear for a groove never really left him.
