Song of the Day: NO ZU - Body2Body

Every Monday through Friday, we deliver a different song as part of our Song of the Day podcast subscription. This podcast features exclusive KEXP in-studio performances, unreleased songs, and recordings from independent artists that our DJ’s think you should hear. Today’s song, featured on the Afternoon Show with Kevin Cole, is “Body2Body” by NO ZU from their 2016 album, Afterlife, out now on Chapter Music.

NO ZU - Body2Body (MP3)

You'd be forgiven (just this once) for not yet knowing who NO ZU is, but not after this post. NO ZU is a collective based out of Melbourne steered by the musical mind of Nicolaas Oogjes, and while he's used the name for various projects for the last nine years, there have been only two official releases by the collective, 2016's Afterlife receiving the most attention yet. Afterlife is a particularly hot, sweaty take on worldbeat music, which is already a vague umbrella term for internationally-inflected dance music. Oogjes refers to it as heat beat, which is as apt a name as I could ever conjure - it's club dance, lead by a pounding, pulsing kick drum that safely anchors whatever wild, at times tribal percussion they choose to lay over it.

"Body2Body" is a fitting name for a song where two separate bodies of music rub up on each other in a steamy, afro post-punk Latin dance explosion - there are the instantly recognizable claps of the 808 drum machine, a flurry of bongos and congas, mechanical synths, all awash in a vocal sample that spaciously and breathily tells us repeatedly "I can feel the heat. It's burning, it's melting me." There are a thousand influences in the soup, the most recognizable being LCD Soundsystem, but all in all there's a certain timelessness to the track, so much so that I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised to hear that this was a wacky late 80's experiment, a drugged-out 90's baby, or a gem that got lost in the mountain of dance music coming out of the UK in the early 00's.

Unfortunately, NO ZU are not on tour in the U.S. any time soon, but keep checking their Facebook page for updates. For now, get a taste of what you're looking for in their video for the lead single off of Afterlife, a fiery track called "Ui Yia Uia," complete with an orgiastic video featuring the whole collective and a gaggle of beefy bodybuilders who seem content lifting weights and flexing as the band plays on: