“Wake Up” From Maffmatix feat. Atiya

There’s nothing clandestine about the new single “Wake Up” from Maffmatix featuring Atiya, and upon pressing the play button on this track, it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to understand exactly what I mean. There is undeniably a slew of ways to assemble a smart dance single, but the way Maffmatix has gone about it lives up to the lofty suggestion of their handle, which is perhaps the best way to frame the zany, cut-loose style electronic pop they’ve been having such an easy time producing this season. I just found out about this act, but they’re on the right page in “Wake Up.”

The subtle spike in the bass element around the midportion of the song is as tremendous a burst of physicality where most will be expecting it the least, but it doesn’t do anything to drown out the presence of the vocal – if anything, this is exactly what Maffmatix needed to land the hook the right way. There are a lot of acts that have been trying to develop swell-style bass components, but few have come up with the streamlined results this pair has inside of such an easy-going, condensed arrangement to begin with.

Maffmatix’s music video for “Wake Up” feels more like a fever dream than it does a standard pop video, which isn’t to say that its cosmetics fall off of some surreal cliff long before we reach the climax of the track. If anything, there’s such a bold tethering of the soundtrack to the visuals that we never have much of a chance when it comes to separating them – truth be told, I don’t think we were ever meant to. This might not be the most cohesive release I’ve ever come across, but the ambitiousness here really does speak for itself on a couple of different levels.

This percussion couldn’t have been much punchier, but this is one of my favorite elements of the underlying arrangement in the song. While some contemporaries of this artist might not be able to grasp a stacked mix without slipping into the pitfalls of overindulgence, this is an artist who shows us that it is possible to utilize excess for all of its strengths and nothing more, which is going to come as quite the brazen surprise to a lot of critics who have been arguing on behalf of a growing minimalist movement for the better part of the last two years.

I really love where Maffmatix is heading with this present sound, and if there’s any real artistic declaration being made in this performance, I think it’s that both the lead and featured artists have a lot more invested in the future of pop than they do anything in the present. This is a very forward-looking single by virtually every measurement, and if Maffmatix is able to continue producing on the level they are in “Wake Up,” it’s going to be hard to sleep on the potential they’re going to be rocking heading into the next year and beyond.

Mindy McCall