Release Date: 12 May 2023
Song Count: 14
Duration: 53 minutes, 26 seconds
Rating: 4.4/10
Description:
Creating a chain of reviewing albums released in the month of May, as this one marks the third one in a row, today's album is the fourth one from Surrey-based music producer Nicolaas Douwma, going by the stage name Sub Focus, and his second most recent release, being suceeded by Contact in November 2025. Sub Focus's music is practically the epitome of modern and accessible drum & bass music, with large-scale use of uncontrasting yet fast and calculated beats at high tempos on top of melodic instrumentals, samples and the singing of collaborating artists that get brought on, and Evolve is no exception.
That is essentially where everything revolving the album both starts and ends, as Evolve offers nothing more and nothing less than a series of cleanly-produced, slick beats that have a slight "jogging"-like percussion style and accompany pianos, keys, synths and sounds of digital nature leading the way for simple melodicism, as well as the aforementioned talents of musicians like Kelli-Leigh, Gene Farris, AR/CO, Hayla, Jonny L and many more. The tracks all follow a quite formulaic and similar pattern of slower starts, standard song building blocks for popular music being used, "drops" that bring in the main course with the full power of the drums and other instruments - albeit often with not much power at all, leading to plenty of non-steep drops - that then carry over for the second verses, and endings that are just one final run of this main soundscape followed by a simple fade-out.
While music like this is relatively inoffensive on its own, it is admittedly a struggle to see much to seek or stick around for in a work like this, due to the lowly contrasted and less conspicuous beats failing to express much inspiration or even to retain major memorability, and the mildly pleasant yet usually admittedly generic instrumentals and vocal styles making the tracks overall feel like one sonical gray blur. This kind of highly marketable albeit, to put it harshly, lukewarm music, may be great for simply having some sort of noise in a background, but will almost never wound up finding itself amongst someone's favourites or being remembered as an all-time classic or work of mastery in any way, being subjected to the tragic yet expected fate of never standing out for what it could have been. It is a shame more than anything, especially for the few tracks that, even when still following the laid-down pattern of every song on the album, do try to attempt something more to give themselves an identity by e.g. using more contrastful drum samples that give them at least a pop of interest, or otherwise slightly more creative sounds and tools - "Ready To Fly", "Secrets", "Turn Up The Bass" and "Fine Day", to name the exact songs which, with the right amount of additional care put into developing their potential, could have become truly remarkable drum & bass pieces.
Evolve as an overall work is one with commercial appeal, a semblance of interesting ideas baked into a part of it, and yet a simlutaneous abundance of missed potential and moments that could have shone brightly but simply didn't commit to taking bolder musical strokes and reach those highs. In an attempt to be as widely pleasing as humanly possible, it ends up coming across as a shallow and drained pool of creative juices rather than the colourful, inspirationally indulgent and simultaneously professional-sounding and expertly well-produced collection of music that it both wants and advertises itself to be with its album cover of an AI-amalgamated nudibranch. In a sense, images of this colourful sea creature being fed into an image generator to create what the public end up seeing here may be an ironic representation of the album's sound as a whole: conceptually fun yet ultimately disappointing.