Release Date: 16 December 2025
Song Count: 11
Rating: 7.3/10
Description:
And here is a second album released yesterday! This one is from Japanese hard trance producer KaKi, and is a project spanning across almost the entire year of 2025, each track having been dropped on the 16th of each month in order - a unique way of releasing an album's worth of songs. KaKi Hard Trance Collection came into my radar through the collaboration done with DJ Noriken, an artist I've known of prior, in the closing track "Nocturne".
Hard trance is a subgenre characterised by strong and pertruding kicks, relatively straightforward beats and percussioning, resonant basslines and fast melodies, often also from electronic sounds, built on top - and if there is a need to find exemplary music that fits this definition to a T, there is no better source than this collection. The beats are loud, jumping and energetic, and invoke further excitement, focus, drama and tension using musical components from their melodies as well as song structure to their advantage. Though sitting through a straight 43 minutes of this genre and this constant level of energy may admittedly become tiring, at least on the initial listen, the songs on their own deliver exactly what they promise, and especially when keeping in mind the originally intended and executed medium of one song arriving every month, it all works itself out in the positives overall.
The genre, to me, is reminiscent of soundtracks from fast-paced racing games or otherwise action-packed media - one can easily imagine speeding in a highway with this blaring from the car's radio, the wind blowing across and the sense of speed and invulnerability being absolutely unmatched. It's a specific energy that is especially tough to replicate with any genre that isn't some form of trance music, and it pertrudes all around KaKi's work.
With a bit of added variety in song structure and flunctuation of the amount of volume the tracks take up, this album could be elevated from a good one to an absolute genre-definer. As it stands right now, however, KaKi Hard Trance Collection is still an enjoyable and fun listen for fans of high-tempo electronic music designed to be danced to, and is a good showcase of what trance music, specifically hard trance music, is all about.