Hot Since 82 tested Buggin at Pacha before anyone could buy it

Every Friday night this season, a room in Ibiza has been hearing a record nobody could buy. The Labyrinth residency at Pacha is into its second run and it’s been doubling as a proving ground for new material, which means a few thousand people in a club had worked out what ‘Buggin’’ does months before anybody else got the chance to. It landed on 28 June through Knee Deep In Sound, the label Daley Padley’s been putting his own music out on since 2014.

It reaches a long way back. The record leans on the house Padley was consuming as a teenager in the early 2000s, atmospheric and sensuous and faintly narcotic, and it’s aged a great deal better than most of what was around it at the time. Jem Cooke sings. Her vocal and his groove are aimed squarely at three in the morning and don’t make a great deal of sense at any other hour of the night. There’s an album behind it too. Eight tracks, due in the autumn, in a format Padley devised for his own label: a broader canvas than an EP allows, without the weight a studio album drags along behind it.

Cooke’s got the harder job of the two. A vocal on a record built this patiently either disappears into the groove or spends the whole thing fighting it, and hers doesn’t do either. She sits far enough forward to stay the thing worth chasing at the wrong end of the night.