In a 2024 interview, León mentioned being uninterested in touring and nightclubs and defined that he was “anti-drums” when he started engaged on A Tropical Entropy. Although they’re not the principle attraction, the drums are available in scorching, touchdown abruptly with needlepoint precision and a low-end heft that crashes like waves towards artifical seawalls. On “R.I.P. Present,” the monitor hits high-gear when the dembow rhythm goes double-time. Melodic components blur like billboards flying by on a freeway, a second of fleeting escape earlier than we’re drawn again into León’s extra insular headspace. Generally issues go too quick, like on “Millennium Freak,” whose stuttering velocity dembow drums and muttered vocals create the chaos of developing too quick ad infinitum, the second you understand that maybe what you took wasn’t what you thought it was. The moods proceed to swing with “Hexxxus,” a club-ready, dancehall-ish monitor that begins out irritable and twitchy, but finally ends up someplace near horny.
When he’s not DJing or producing pop singers, León calls himself a sound artist—which incorporates his work for an set up centered round a coral reef off the coast of Miami—and A Tropical Entropy contains a few of his richest and most evocative sounds. “Metromover” is underwater techno, with synth notes and vocal snippets touchdown at random like mild filtering by means of the floor of the ocean. The album’s catchiest track, “Crush,” is barely 91 seconds lengthy and created from a sequence of seemingly disconnected arpeggios that kind a romantic entire gone earlier than it, as if León is catching wisps of smoke and manipulating them till they fade away fully.
These impermanent sounds, the way in which they seem to move by means of glass and water, mimic the city panorama of Miami, proper right down to its famously decadent nightlife. The flickering emotional interference is the product of too many nights out, once you’ve rewired your mind just a little too eagerly—and incorrectly. It’s the bizarre peaceful-agitated-buzzing-sad feeling you get after leaving Downtown Miami bar The Nook at 7 a.m. for a pointless post-club drink you undoubtedly didn’t want (“Product of Attraction,” which seems like a UK storage love track and lament tied into one excruciating knot, may’ve been made after a bender like that).
Miami is a spot of contradictions that may really feel precarious simply by current: too scorching, consistently underneath menace from hurricanes, at risk of falling into the ocean. Equally precarious and unsuited for our occasions is the lifetime of the DJ—or anybody who has skilled aspirations across the dance music trade. This can be a scene that may kill you as a lot because it nourishes you, pulling you into the undertow whereas supplying you with fleeting glimpses of success, enjoyable, and glory, placing folks on a pedestal for the mere act of taking part in music to drink and do medication to.
A Tropical Entropy is a self-deprecating title for a landmark second in León’s profession. Certain, there’s progress right here, however there’s additionally doubling again, beginning over, giving into nervousness, generally all in the identical monitor. The unsteady rhythms and uncertain track constructions reveal the malaise in returning not solely to Miami however to bop music itself, which makes A Tropical Entropy really feel alive and imperfect, identical to the town it was born in. Pleasure mingles with restlessness and unease, whereas the sepia wash of despair bleeds in on the corners. All of it involves a head because the jittery “Broward Boyy” transitions into “Bikini,” León’s 2024 hit that returns to shut out the album. This oceanside torch track was at all times melancholy, however now there’s one thing else in it. Relying in your studying, “Meet me on the seashore” may both be a romance lowered to routine or a Springsteenian name to flee. Perhaps it’s each without delay, the sound of somebody locked in a cycle they will’t get out of.
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