Sextile kicks off Yes, Please with one hell of an “Intro.” It’s all alarms, distorted vocals and squelching electronics that make you think the L.A.-based duo have plans to drop you back into a 1992 Prodigy jam. They don’t. Instead, Sextile diverts you to the sweat-drenched warehouse of right now with “Women Respond to Bass,” a banger for the afters where the subs send the low-end pulsing through the soles of your Docs, and the previously released single “Freak Eyes.”
While Sextile’s base is in the darkwave scene, thanks to club hits like “Disco” and, more recently, their tour opening for Molchat Doma, Yes, Please is not at all a darkwave album. Instead, Melissa Scaduto and Brady Keehn expand the rave-adjacent edges of their last album, Push, and refine them into a dynamic fusion of dance music genres. The sound is eclectic and that can be a bit hit-or-miss, with the hits and misses dependent upon the listener’s personal taste. For example, I’ve never been able to get into gabber, so the previously released single “Kids,” with its punch-the-ceiling tempo, is something I’d skip over. But, the groovy “99 Bongos” and the punky “S Is For” are likely going into my Rekordbox crate and there’s a very good chance that the mutant disco “Rearrange” will turn up regularly in my DJ sets going forward.
The throughline on Yes, Please is the energy. Sextile goes hard on the album’s first three tracks, but even when they drop the tempo for a much needed respite on “Penny Rose,” there’s a feistiness to the music that remains. They immediately raise pulse rates with “Push Ups,” which features guest vocals from Jehnny Beth, and keep the dance party going through “Resist,” a fiery tune about abortion rights, “Kiss” and the breakbeat “Hospital,” before winding things down with “Soggy Newports.”
Overall, Yes, Please is an incredibly strong album. Sextile isn’t making feel-good dance music. Instead, they’ve given us an intense workout, one that might leave you panting before you get to “Push Ups,” but you’ll feel better having danced through it. Yes, Please is about as punk as dance music gets, filled with anger, frustration and everything else that we want to release on the dance floor. It’s the kind of music that we need now as an antidote to life inside the doomscroll, the kind of music that is sorely lacking in a timeline driven by passive likes and algorithms that reward the same old-same old.
Get Yes, Please by Sextile and check out the band’s upcoming tour dates.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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