Escalate is an album that takes the entire lineage of British rave culture and pushes every button until the whole thing detonates.

Beginning with everything filtered out, we hear a low-pass thump and the familiar pulse of being outside the warehouse with bass frequencies leaking from a concrete room behind a shutter door. A half-whispered monologue begins full of anticipation, and as the filter rises and the synths begin to reveal themselves it’s clear that VLURE aren’t simply reaching for nostalgic revivalism, but for the purest possible expression of rave’s emotional and physical intensity they can create, stretched to a level that the older generations never quite dared.

When the beat drops, it isn’t just nostalgic but mind-rattlingly intense. This is 90s rave rewritten for a world that has only gotten darker and heavier.

VLURE stitch together everything that once defined British clubbing, with the acid squelch, the resonant filters, the heavy piano stabs and chopped-vocal stutters, the breakbeats and seratonin-surged synth detonations that shaped the 90s, but none of it feels cheesy. Despite using the building blocks of some pretty silly genres like speed garage and happy hardcore, Escalate sounds deadly emotionally serious and physically overwhelming.

A huge part of VLURE’s power comes from Hamish Hutcheson’s vocals, delivered in a thick Glaswegian accent and pulling the whole thing away from nostalgia and straight into gritty reality. We aren’t in Ibiza, we’re in dreary Scotland, soaked in sweat in a damp stairwell. The passion and urgency evoke the spoken-word trance of Underworld’s Karl Hyde but the tone is far rougher and more desperate, preventing all the maximalism from drifting into caricature as he delivers sermons for the warehouse floor.

Something Real takes classic sky-high synths and a chopped vocal with a hybrid of live drums and guitars paired with blistering electronics and it sounds like the release that comes at the end of the hardest week of your life. Heartbeat fires a synth line so big it touches the stratosphere, and Between Dreams sprints at a BPM that would usually feel comical, but somehow doesn’t feel at all stupid in their hands. VLURE have the remarkable ability to build their music using all the classic cheesy rave building blocks, but they make it land with an urgent and vital force, treating rave as a tool for emotional obliteration the way black metal treats blast beats.

Feels Like Heaven is the reflective midpoint, still pounding but carving out a little melancholy bubble inside the rave. Let It Escalate is an adrenaline-dripping, frenzied banger to accelerate the heart-rate, and the closer featuring Bobby Gillespie is an inspired piece of casting. Primal Scream wrote the blueprint for transcendent rave-rock fusion back in the day, and VLURE feel like the next evolutionary step with the brute force of punk, the dirt of industrial, and the adrenaline of a club at 4am. This is Glasgow’s cultural inheritance pushed into its wildest state yet, taking everything you know about rave and turning the intensity all the way into the red. One of the most intense dance records Britain has produced in years.