Song Recommendation: “Lucid” by Daniel Brandt (2025)

Daniel Brandt’s six-minute mini-epic already starts in second gear with a tension-filled baseline that quickly proceeds to find a head-nodding krautrock rhythm that carries us through the increasingly galloping back-half of the song as spiky synths intercept the additional percussion loops. Surprisingly, it never fully explodes into dance-floor chaos, instead choosing to keep us slightly off-kilter, occasionally dropping out the rhythmic backbone to shower us with mournful synth pads. In that sense, it wears its Computer World lineage proudly on its sleeve, but from another angle, I think it also serves to reinforce the aural thesis of the entire track. It is, after all, more about the journey than the destination.