Twenty years into a career spent making speakers sweat, Washington DC-area producer LJ MTX has a new EP, and it landed in our lap.
Just Rave does exactly what it says on the tin: two versions of the same unapologetically club track, built from festival synths, snarling bass, acid squelches and enough old-school sirens to make your neighbours consider moving.
Just Rave (feat. Lib B) (LJ MTX Remix) arrives first and goes straight for the main stage. Its synth leads are deliberately oversized, the bassline drives forward without much ceremony, and those TB-303 lines give the production a welcome streak of warehouse grime.
It is polished enough for a festival field but carries just enough dirt beneath its fingernails to avoid sounding completely sanitised.
Lib B’s tongue-in-cheek spoken-word performance is the record’s smartest move. Her observations about kandi, festival clothing and the changing codes of rave culture bring some personality to a genre that can become fixated on drops at the expense of saying anything.
The remix is engineered with precision. Every rise, pause and impact lands exactly where an experienced dancefloor expects it to land. That reliability is also its limitation.
The track rarely risks derailing its own momentum, and its festival-sized structure can feel a little too carefully measured. A stranger transition, a nastier acid breakdown or a moment of genuine rhythmic disruption could have made the final drop feel less inevitable. When a record talks about rave’s rebellious past, it ought to sound capable of breaking at least one rule.
Just Rave (feat. Lib B) (Original Mix) follows with the same central idea presented in a less aggressively inflated frame. With more room around its component parts, the vocal concept becomes clearer and the nostalgic rave references breathe more naturally.
The sirens and acid lines feel less like accessories attached to a modern EDM machine and more like part of the track’s actual bloodstream.
There is, however, an unavoidable sense of repetition in placing two closely related versions together. The original mix reveals useful detail, but a more substantial change in arrangement, tempo or atmosphere would give the EP a stronger reason to exist as a two-track package.
An underground club version that pushed further into the darkness hinted at by the 303 could have provided a sharper contrast to the remix’s crowd-facing bombast.
Still, LJ MTX knows precisely what large-room dance music is supposed to do. Two decades of experience can be heard in the muscular low end, clean separation and refusal to clutter the central hook.
He isn’t chasing whichever microscopic dance trend happens to be clogging up playlists this week. Instead, he connects classic rave signifiers with contemporary MainStage force and lets Lib B supply the human grin behind the machinery.
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