After dropping one of the much-loved albums of 2023, Portraits Of Tracy returns with a deluxe version of Drive Home: Parting Gifts. Boasting six new reworks and a previously unheard song, the collection transforms them into heady, propulsive, and endlessly inventive dance anthems. As if we needed more proof that the 19-year-old artist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist is a hitmaking prodigy—the deluxe tracklist is one rife with hypnotic bangers.
With an ear for cinematic soundscapes, Drive Home: Parting Gifts unsurprisingly delivers by drawing you in and immersing you within Portraits Of Tracy’s sonic world. But this time, their songs are charged with frantic momentum as they thrum to the velocity of concussive drops and meteoric instrumentals. That dizzying kineticism is activated by “Lost! (Flip),” a startling overhaul of the album’s first song that unleashes wave after wave of surging bass.
Yet even as Portraits Of Tracy flexes their talent for reimagination, the deluxe offerings also preserve the emotional dynamism that made the originals so visceral in the first place. Take, for instance, “Drunk (French House Flip),” which morphs their honest, feverishly desperate lyricism into a delirium of cut-up disco gear shifts and spellbinding funk, or the way “Graceland (2chill Flip)” capitalizes on the original’s spiraling synth crescendos to create a magnetizing, feel-good blitz of electronica.
Drive Home: Parting Gifts also features two hot new takes on “The Afterparty,” one an ecstatic disco dance party that shimmers and grooves with its irresistibly refulgent riffs, the other a French house instrumental gushing with shuddering bass and dreamily sleek synths. But its standout track is without a doubt “Found But Dilla” (feat. Duckwrth), swapping out the dancefloor reworks for a new song that pays its respect to J. Dilla‘s indelible style with its contortions of noisily electric alt-R&B.
“‘Found But Dilla’ is inspired by none other than…. J. Dilla!” Tracy explained. “I wanted to pay homage while still giving a bit of my style (vocally.) It’s like a J. Dilla, Alternative R&B hybrid thang. Last, but definitely not least…Duckwrth’s verse is smooth like butter!!!”
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Words: Steven Ward
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