Music often becomes the truest medium for revealing what’s hidden deep inside the soul and the heart. Artists who seek to show the world what they live and breathe tend to create music that feels alive, magnetic, and impossible to ignore.
Among those visionaries is EME, a Colombian DJ and producer who thrives on the collision of World Music and Jazz. His debut solo album gangster-ish—a sweeping, twenty-track odyssey—captures the full spectrum of his passions and influences. The result is a work overflowing with color, rhythm, and vitality, capable of brightening your day, your mood, and your sense of what music can feel like.
Beyond music, EME expresses himself through film and photography, seeing life as it is and drawing inspiration from nature and immersion in the world itself. He’s also the frontman of the collective Monsieur Job. That grounding in freedom, openness, and love of music is woven throughout gangster-ish, which feels at once universal and deeply personal. Across the album, you’ll hear ethereal synths and seismic basslines, the chaos of dance energy wrapped in tenderness, and even a nod to the football world in Real Madrid’s anthem Hala Madrid y nada más.
At its heart, gangster-ish comes across as a debut that’s full of soul and built with care piece by piece. There’s a restless, many-sided inner world behind it, where layers of electronic sound meet lived-in feelings—sometimes messy, sometimes beautiful. Hearing it, you get this strange sense that the music is right there under your fingertips, almost breathing with you. The whole record feels like the outcome of stubborn, day‑to‑day work, the kind that keeps going through long nights and patience that runs thin. EME puts that effort in completely, and it shows. His hope is to pull listeners together across borders, channeling his passion for Real Madrid into something bigger. The album threads a line through places—Spain, the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, England, Australia, Japan—so it all moves to the same pulse.
The opener EMPTYYOURMIND_444_777 immediately establishes the album’s meditative yet fluid tone. Its concept of infinity, water, and cosmic connection unfolds through piano lines that shimmer like liquid light. The track’s seven-minute-and-twenty-seven-second runtime becomes a river of curiosity—an invitation to drift deeper.
With ES REAL, the tempo darkens. The melody gives way to menacing synths and thunderous bass, sculpting a dystopian world of metallic edges and cyberpunk machinery. It’s disorienting, dense, and thrillingly tense.
GOD IS LOVE swings to the opposite pole—a celebration carried by deep, confident bass and crisp electronic structure. The track channels EME’s spirituality with hypnotic force, its whirlpool of sound spinning between intensity and transcendence. The title track, gangster-ish, reintroduces the warmth of jazz: a soft double bass, subtle keys, a drizzle of ambient rain. The fusion of jazz phrasing and atmospheric electronics is effortlessly cinematic. You can see the scenes unfolding in your mind—humid nights, distant lights, quiet rain falling on open streets.
If the album’s city heartbeat had a soundtrack, it would be JIBBER TALK EZE38. Its energy embodies motion—bright, controlled, urban. The production twists through vivid turns, evoking the sense of exploring a neon-lit metropolis. It’s that cinematic imagination again, alive in EME’s shifting sound design and irresistible pulse. As gangster-ish unfolds, its conceptual clarity becomes unmistakable. Each track builds toward an architectural sense of purpose. The surreal minimalism of ROMARIO11GARRINCHA7PELE10 reflects light like a prism, while RC3+6 bursts into fiery industrial motion, propelled by chants that mirror the adrenaline of football crowds. The dubstep framework amplifies the game’s tension—immediate, physical, and ecstatic.
REAL.MADRID.1902 feels like an unofficial anthem for the club itself—an electric hymn built on radiant synth harmonies and cascading electronic lines. It burns with freedom, summer light, and exuberance. It’s one of the album’s high points, and one of EME’s personal moments of triumph.
The final track, FUCK.THE.SYSTEM_9:15AM_Agosto1, closes the album with a reappearing monologue; however, together with piano, as in the first track, the voice dissolves into dense EDM. The dance energy of EME in FUCK.THE.SYSTEM_9:15AM_Agosto1 is filled with a commercial spark in the vocals and bright, stylish transitions from one part to another. And such a saturated conclusion of the album brings you back to earth, grounding you, while a light cosmic atmosphere adds a touch of sci‑fi intrigue and unrestrained, tempestuous sex.
Ultimately, gangster-ish stands as EME’s statement of identity—a bold, stadium-scale sound that stamps itself into the listener’s consciousness like the chants of football fans echoing through a night match. If you seek music that bends reality—where basslines pulse like galaxies and electronic textures breathe human emotion—then gangster-ish belongs on your playlist. In it, EME arrives as a fully realized solo artist, blending electronic innovation, emotional gravity, and populist audacity into one unmistakably original voice.
FIND OUT MORE AT
*This review was made possible by SubmitHub
Indie Boulevard Magazine 