Free Love - Extreme Dance Anthems (Optimo Music)

Glasgow-based duo Free Love light up the darkness of the moment with Extreme Dance Anthems, a magickal mini-album of cosmic acid house on Optimo Music

Extreme Dance Anthems is the sound of cosmic seams running through Glasgow’s underground. Over the course of their miraculous new mini-album on Optimo Music, Free Love (formerly known as Happy Meals) rip up the dancefloor, dissect reality and birth way-out-there pop magic with their particular brand of expansive and psychedelic electronic manoeuvres. The mini-album as a format is the perfect vehicle for this act of alchemy to occur. It makes for a succinct statement that, in the hands of Free Love, contains universes underneath.

Their name, alongside the cultivated magickal personas of Suzi Rodden and Lewis Cook, might carry connotations of 1960s counterculture and its descent into Death Valley 69 (to borrow a phrase from Sonic Youth), but Free Love are less Aleister Crowley and more Patrick Cowley. Think the positivity of the Second Summer of Love, but with a contemplative hedonism, a questioning awareness of the world.

“The Inner Revolution” emerges with circling analogue bleeps, a slithering electronic pulse and New Age instrumentation dancing on the surface. It simultaneously feels of this earth and not of this earth; like Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain reborn as a Glasgow deep club cut. It’s then quickly down the rabbit hole with “Out of Body”, a drone-walled passage into the inner sanctum of the album, arriving at the dancefloor destroying “Bones”. A Balearic anthem for the ages, “Bones” is a heady cocktail of visionary acid house and disco not disco. The track plugs directly into the pleasure centres with its down and dirty acid squelch, while Roddin takes a lyrical scalpel to mortality. “I live too much inside my head”, she sings like a distant star. “On days like these, I can forget / One day we will all be dead” – hardly the stuff of dancefloor abandon perhaps. But it is exactly the stuff that is needed and is ultimately a rallying cry for living life in the moment, of resisting: “But here we are alive, instead / Here we are alive instead” – and repeat. Glorious doesn’t quite cover it.

The revved-up, bleep and bass driven “Skin on Skin” has a 1980s rudimentary electronic edge with an open-arms vibe coming off it in (new) waves. An updated take on something you could imagine coming out of the Dark Entries stable perhaps. Free Love proceed to strip things back with “Everyone”, a third-eye opening slowed-down burner. Roddin sings about Ecstasy / of the Ecstatic – her voice given mystical import by its distance in the mix, somewhere beyond the veil – bringing French to the table in a dual language workout. It’s a detailed, seductive piece of internationalist avant-house music that worms its way into higher states of consciousness. “Everyone” flows seamlessly into “Everywhere”, a continuation of the theme that backs away from the mystical and grounds the continuing affair in reality. The rhythmic drive is given primacy here, with drums coiling around the 4/4 and crafting a subtly danceable exit device.

That Free Love have followed up the magnificent Luxury Hits (2018) with an even more vital musical statement is some kind of walk-on-water performance. For Extreme Dance Anthems feels like a way of living through the darkness and Free Love might just be the most essential band of the moment, on this or any other plane of existence.