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How Hip-Hop Producer Kaytranada Quietly Won This Week’s Battle Of The Albums

Leonie Cooper

It’s always the quiet ones you’ve got to watch. In a week in which Skepta, Radiohead and James Blake dominated the music headlines and sonic blogosphere with their brand new albums, it fell down to a 23-year-old Haiti-born and Montreal-raised producer and DJ called Louis Kevin Celestin to casually put out perhaps the finest record of the bunch. Under the Kaytranada name Celestin has served up the impeccable ’99.9%’, a sublime, sunshine-y hip-hop and house infused debut album – and one with some sweet artwork courtesy of Spanish artist Ricardo Cavolo.

Touching on everything from J Dilla to old school disco, it also features the best thing Craig David’s done since ‘Born To Do It’ in the shape of the ultra-smooth ‘Got It Good’. And the Southampton garage don isn’t the only artfully chosen special guest here.

Syd from Odd Future offshoot The Internet lends her airy vocals to ‘You’re The One’, a Jessy Lanza style glitch pop banger with the catchiest chorus this side of Bieber’s ‘What Do You Mean?’ Anderson Paak melts himself all over the horizontal R&B of ‘Glowed Up’ and Aluna Francis of AlunaGeorge bounces through ‘Together’ with spot-on pop precision. Jazzy Canadian musos Badbadnotgood take things to a deep, delicious place on ‘Weight Off’ while Chicago rapper Vic Mensa owns ‘Drive Me Crazy’ and Little Dragon sign off the album’s 15 tracks with the floating ‘Bullets’.

Despite his fondness for uber-hip collaborations, Kaytranda also allows himself plenty of time to shine solo. Check out ‘Lite Spots’ – with its newly released video below – where he performs some magic Madlib style crate-diggery and repurposes Brazilian singer Gal Costa’s Tropicalia treat ‘Pontos De Luz’, adding some beefier beats and pushing the track firmly into 2016.

Listen to the original here:

So if you’re looking for the soundtrack to your summer, then ’99.9%’ is 100% what you need. And if you don’t believe us, take it from Kaytranada’s super slick muso mates.

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