Desk Dance Party is the most fully realised Punchliners EP - four drum and bass tracks about the experience of working in an office, written with the energy of a Friday-night DnB set and the subject matter of a Monday-morning standup.
The EP
The premise is the joke and the joke is the premise: take the most punishing, dance-floor-ready genre in modern electronic music, and apply it to the most punishing, fluorescent-lit corner of modern life. Desk Dance Party opens the EP with the title track - a high-BPM banger about getting freaky next to the printer. Office Crew turns the team meeting into a hype anthem. Monday Morning finds romance in the fluorescent light of a 9am stand-up. Proper Day closes the record with the only quiet track in the bunch - a single about waking up late, smelling the tea, and hearing the kids in the garden, scored as if it were the most triumphant moment in a stadium-sized DnB set.
The story
Desk Dance Party is the moment The Punchliners' premise really clicks. The mismatch between the production and the lyric is so wide, and so committed-to, that the EP starts to feel like a tiny manifesto: any subject can be a banger if you give it the right BPM. There's a sneaky tenderness in Proper Day that almost breaks the joke - for thirty seconds you forget the EP is satire and start to actually enjoy the calm - and that's exactly what makes the rest of it land.