Watch Out! - EP

“It’s about movement in so many different ways,” India Jordan tells Apple Music on Watch Out!. It’s an EP conceptualized by the artist during times of relative quietude—train journeys to gigs, long-distance cycling, even the lack of movement brought upon by a global pandemic. But the result manages to translate the mundane into tracks that demand listeners be affected. There are thundering synths, vocal screams hopeful for swelling dancefloors, and bubbling notes of house perfectly capturing the heady rise of energy arising before you get there. Still, the project equally articulates their movements in terms of personhood and development, communicating major life events, individual quirks and experiences by way of sonics. “I’ve transitioned quite a lot as the EP was being made,” they say. “It was only a week or two after [I started the first track] that I came out as non-binary. I’ve spent the last year or so coming to terms with that, and getting confident in myself and my own gender identity. It’s very much tied into the music that I was making.” Here, Jordan takes us through Watch Out!, breaking things down track by track.

Only Said Enough
“I started making this around December of 2019 and finished it on a train up to Hull in February 2020. Finn [McCorry, UK DJ and artist] and I were about to play back-to-back together at a night that we actually used to run, it’s a homage to all of those nights we used to play together. He’d said I should make a big hardcore vocal track because I make hardcore music but not often with a vocal as a primary focus. I describe this one as a tune that smacks you in the face; I like the boldness of it, especially because it’s the start of the EP. It’s anticipatory, excited—wanting to scream in your face a bit, which is kind of what it does.”

Watch Out!
“This was the first track I made back in 2019. I got into this thing of making tunes at Christmas when I was at my mum’s house in Doncaster, because there’s nothing else to do. I originally made this with a lot of melodies in it but got really stuck creatively. So I stripped it all down, just to the sub and the breaks for the drop. It was quite a a bold track to make and it felt like one of the better things I’d made production-wise with the technicality of it and how I put it together. It helped me with my own levels of confidence as a producer, and I named the EP after it because it’s the one I’m most proud of.”

You Can’t Expect The Cars To Stop If You Haven’t Pressed The Button
“I went to Dublin last year, and found that their pelican crossing sounds are just mad. I thought, ‘I need to sample this.’ I took some field recordings, sampled a crossing in Peckham and also used my voice in it as well. I really wanted to swear on this track; I recorded me going, ‘Oh, for f**k's sake!’ because it’s what I say when I turn up to a crossing and someone hasn’t pressed the button—it’s just one of my pet peeves! This track doesn’t take itself too seriously and it’s quite fun. I don’t really take myself too seriously either and neither does my music, so I’m glad that a part of my personality came out in it. I want [listeners] to have a little giggle, and I want them to start pressing the button when they want to cross the road.”

Feierabend
“‘Feierabend’ translates to ‘free evening’ in German, it means: ‘the joy you feel when you finish work.’ The majority of the track was made after work one evening which is why I called it that; my friend [UK DJ and producer] Dance System and I were talking about the speed in which he makes tracks. He makes so many, all really quickly because he doesn’t want to get sick of a sample and lose his creative flow. I gave it a go to see how quickly I could make a track and this is what came out of it. It’s 156bpm, so not footwork but the bass at the beginning is quite footwork-y or juke-y. I love [US DJ and producer] Traxman, juke and footwork, and I think it reminded me of how he samples a lot of soul and will loop it. The vocals say ‘Friday’ and it all connects to that. It’d be nice if people listen to it just after they finish work for the weekend, and they’re getting excited.”

And Groove
“It’s obviously a bit more of a downtempo one. The individual piano keys are reminiscent of the deeper side of Chicago house, and the deep house that came out in the early ’90s. I made this one during lockdown in 2020, a period where I wasn’t really listening to much hardcore and super-heavy dance stuff. It was so painful to listen to hardcore because it would just make me miss outside, and I didn’t know when I was going to get it back. I was listening to a lot more downtempo and ‘And Groove’ came after that. It’s kind of reminiscent of a train journey, something I was missing. The lyrics are ‘on and on and groove,’ kind of like what the tune does itself, but then also like the rhythmic pattern of the train—the chugging along sort of thing.”