Album Review: Mayday by Boys Noize

Around ten years ago, a revolution in electro was taking place and the genre was just about to enter a period of boom around the world. Few acts have managed to stay in the game as long as Boys Noize though and Alex Ridha has remained at the forefront of the scene for over a decade. He’s managed to find that perfect balance in keeping his sound consistent and recognisable while at the same time evolving it and bringing new elements and tweaks to its nature.

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Alexander Ridha has, to this point, remained admirably resistant to the surge of mainstream EDM and the influence of its broader appeal, at least in the sense that he had been crafting more-or-less the same brash, aggressive, uncomplicated dance music that he hit gold with all the way back in 2007 with Boys Noize’s debut Oi Oi Oi. Of course, quite a bit has changed (for Ridha, who’s begun appearing alongside superstar DJs at the world’s biggest music festivals, and for electronic music as a whole) since Boys Noize’s last record in 2012, and his latest, Mayday, may signal a turning point for that long-standing consistency. The record reflects the many changes of the last few years, but it is done in a surprisingly dynamic way, (mostly) uncharacteristic of the stock commercial formulas and focus-group-tested sentiment of today’s blockbuster EDM.

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In 2007, Alex Ridha’s debut album as Boys Noize, Oi Oi Oi, encapsulated clubbing’s Ed Banger era of shouty beats and pedantic energy, bridging electro and techno with maximalist mortar and a tearaway spirit. Since then, Ridha hasn’t crossed over to the mainstream in the way that contemporaries such as Hudson Mohawke, Skrillex and Diplo have. But now he’s playing into the jaws of the EDM market.

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