Multi-faceted artist Darama delivers first edition of his Refractions EP
London-based producer Darama launches a new era with Refractions θ1, the first EP in an ongoing series, and the first release under a sharpened rebrand. Built for the dancefloor but designed to live beyond it, Refractions is rooted in a simple belief: dance music as a place of self discovery. Darama refracts familiar UK club language through hip-hop swing, grime pressure, and South Asian texture – not to replay the past, but to push the feeling forward until it lands somewhere new.
Across three tracks, Refractions θ1 moves with the confidence of peak-time music, but with the detail of a producer obsessed with world-building, rhythmic swing, cinematic cues, and South Asian instrumentation used as architecture rather than decoration. Anchored around 110 BPM, Darama carves a new lane in a tempo pocket that’s still largely under-mapped. It’s anti-nostalgia without being anti-past, an attempt to honour where the culture came from while refusing to let it calcify into a loop.
ASHES opens the EP in motion: a driving drum groove with 00s UKG-leaning chords and a bassline built for forward momentum. Darama threads in vocal fragments from Asha Bhosle’s “Esho Alo Esho Hey”, flipping multiple moments of the source into a new emotional engine – bright, urgent, and strangely intimate. A euphoric horn line lifts the track into a hands-in-the-air rush before the arrangement folds into a swirling, hypnotic breakdown where the original instrumentation dissolves into its own shadow.
On CRYSTALS (feat. Nine Levels), Darama leans into hip-hop production language, a classic Timbaland-inspired bounce reframed for club systems. Degraded South Asian strings flicker like memories rendered in low resolution, while a heavy 808 undercarriage keeps the track grounded. Nine Levels delivers lyrics focused on impact and legacy, the tension between chasing a mark on the world and the cost of trying. Digital arpeggios spiral overhead, creating a “portal” feeling: not escape, but departure.
GIRLS LIKE THE WHIP is the EP’s most playful left-turn: Darama nods to the classic B15 “Girls Like Us”, but pushes it through early grime-informed sound design, a bouncy 808 bassline, and an uplifting keyboard riff designed for peak escapism. Underneath, a bed of car screeches, road noise, and drifting FX pulls from British Asian car culture that specific night-time mythos of piling into your cousin’s car with the stereo turned up, but reframed as a future-memory rather than a throwback. A cheeky voice clip about RS3s seals the scene: hyper-local detail, widescreen energy.
Refractions θ1 is the beginning of a longer arc, not reinvention for reinvention’s sake, but a clearer lens on what Darama has been building: UK dance music pushed somewhere it hasn’t been yet, without losing the human reason it matters. Music that gives people permission to be their unrestricted self, on a dancefloor or elsewhere.
