You break up. It's tragic. Blindsided by its suddenness, you scramble for the why of it all. Not comforted by the answers, you reach for the Night Out. "Please don't go on a self-destructive streak" is one of the last things they say and "Well that's my prerogative" is one of the last things you say and the Night Out is right there and Destiny is what it's like. Your friends show up with stamped wrists and villainous portraits of your beartbreaker and praise for you and your brain and your body (same thing) rattle between apotheosis and doubt and yearning and reconciliation over the next few hours and DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ's new album is what it's like.
DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ sounded like a joke shortly before her music became an enduring obsession. And the obsessives? We're eating: eight albums in fewer years (besides countless mixes and remixes), each one a sprawling tour that recontextualises every elevation of -brow from schmaltz allegedly as base as TV sitcoms and midday movies to Avalanches and Aphex Twin influences as radical emotional detournement. To call it plunderphonics may hint at the structural approach but undermines the emotional dimension, and plunderphonics sure as hell has never been as fun as this. Unlike the Bootie-ish too-clever-by-halfness of your Girl Talks et al., DJ Sabrina’s a less explicit semiotician. Part of this is the tie-dyed wash of samples and original production that make it unclear where one begins and another ends. Even the first track on Bewitched! makes one feel dropped into the middle of another album. No mere juxtaposeur, Sabrina’s tracks evoke rather than neatly point at. Half-heard snippets of dialogue rise out of the mix like fragments of conversations from across a bar, a rhythm will snap into focus and ten listens later you realise it was in the background all along. Lyrics, such as they are, have the quality of FM radio hits heard on car rides, blurry and misheard. Samples beget non-stop mondegreens where Sabrina’s perversions of the original result in deliciously personal interpretations, audio horoscopes that take the shape of one’s feelings. These mondevertiginous spins have sent me blindly grasping at whosampled.com like a drunk child at a pinata and even constantly missing doesn’t sour the experience.
Well let's take a look at this here bio. Who is DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ? Nobody rightly knows (good.) Where's she from? UK. What's she about? "My favorite artists sound as though their music came from an unspecified entity that doesn't give any tells on how they felt about it and lets the listener interpret the emotion. To me, a lot of my music sounds very tragic and heavy as it puts on a happy face, and I like that feeling."
Charmed cracked the blogoscene in 2021 but even by then, Sabrina had a crate worth digging of her own spanning stylistic sways and a dozen hours of copypastiche zinelectro that all felt like every club-ensconced internal monologue at once. Atop the tenets of house music, no matter how the execution changes album to album, her music built out in every dimension a space that feels like compilation as much as soundtrack.
And yet despite it's 4/4-y leanings, DJ Sabrina is perfect music to be alone to. How about you? The most alone I ever feel is when everyone’s gone home after A Night. I think most of the comedown after A Night isn’t all the stuff doctors warn you about, it’s the sudden absence of the people you love. When you love the people you love a lot, that love feels a lot more absent in their absence. And Destiny tries its best to fill that silence.
"Honey" takes us in. Albums past have eased into their mood, but "Honey" feels like opening credits. Right away samples clatter against the voice of a radio host, one of the most potent tools in DJ Sabrina's repertoire, as people make song dedications to each other. Are you dedicator/dedicatee/dedicated? Well, words like "cinematic" get thrown around about music all the time but time was the most cinematic one could feel about their own life was to have a love song dedicated to them over the radio, some velvet-voiced DJ scoring all that heartfelt fumbling, and here's DJ Sabrina to pick up the mantle Fall Out Boy put down 16 years ago as the therapist pumping through your speakers.
Music critics must be avid campers the way they talk about tentpoles but the way Destiny is structured is less a yurt and more a mesa-planted mini-campus. The first of these is "Brave". A chipswoony banger and and the first of the album trading in another Sabrina trademark, the motivational message. Contradictorily these voice overs always sound to me like midday movies or afternoon soaps, recasting kitsch as revelation. Maybe it's the Wendie Malick samples on Charmed's "Not Your Fault" and being a certain age that the most Just Shoot Me I watched on its original airing were the day-after reruns. Maybe that's just the synechdoche, the example that speaks to the root. DJ Sabrina sees the prettiness in it all, whether in big climactic country ballads or three-camera sound-stage sitcoms.
I tried to write about everything DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ meant to me over the past two years and thousands of listens. I couldn't. But I could at least write about a seven song run I started thinking about as The Breakup Arc.
You break up. It's tragic. Damn near the most mundane thing that can happen to a person when you think about it but feels like a catastrophe every time, all those pieces of who you were now taped off and chalk-lined. "It's Still Me" drawls over with its sultry little saxophone licks and you hear "I'm okay... I've just been thinking about this whole... distance thing." Fucking rip my heart out. And as the final strands of tenderised cartilage start to tear you wonder: "Wait, is this from Ashanti's Christmas album?" Can you hear the busyness of holidaydrunk window shoppers snuggled up beneath the thumpclapthumpclap? But still, there's something cooling about the VST pianos that glide over the opening. Maybe it's just that it bears a vague resemblance to the tones of Mario 64's overworld music and its tranquility. Its safety.
And then "Something New":
"I just let go of the idea that it would ever be good again. It would just be easier to end it. But I don't want to. But what if we try and it doesn't work?"
"Maybe you'd regret not trying more."
More somber now, the synths and guitars all curious and tentative. Is this fetal position on therapy couch or curled up on friend's sofa? When the song breaks and the chaos clears:
"What if we can't get back to where we were?"
"Maybe you could make something new."
And DJ Sabrina loops that first line, fractured to beat match like the way she did for Natalie Portman's "How / You do / All the beautiful things / You will do" on Makin' Magick's "All The Beautiful Things U Do", the violins stab all assertive, trying on a newfound confidence against the vocalised fear.
The other side shows up on "Because Love". The cause of this whole conversation gets a voice.
"I'm just asking to see you because I don't wanna lose you. I'll be here and you'll be there and it'll just be long distance because... I'm crazy about you."
"I'm crazy about you too."
And the chorus just repeats: "Because love." It's the question and the answer. Why you'd end it, why you'd try to make it work. But anyone who's taken a few licks in this arena knows no matter how many times you repeat it, "because love" is never a winning gamble. As it slides towards its end there's a soft "But I'm crazy about you..."
Arpeggiated synths spiral with new hope as an overly frank friend says "You get what you get. You get upset. You cry a little. And then you get over it." And they're right but boy it smarts like an ice bath, which means you will, no doubt, ease out of it later with some of those deeply knotted aches a little less present. Bright little bursts of trumpet peek through the mix like star fragments of a future.
"You know I was thinking this, us, doesn't have to end. And maybe we could go somewhere and be together, get away from all this. What do you say?"
"Let's go."
"Will U B Mine" sounds all climactic and buoyant. The perfect resolution. But the dialogues suggest something else, more like the "But I don't want to" of "Something New" has manifested and the reality is a backslide or a second chance at least. "To me, a lot of my music sounds very tragic," Sabrina said, remember? And over the top, "Will U B Mine" is an ecstatic sprint, the final release after the tension and confusion of the previous tracks. God, the key change. The key change! But the dialogue is more hesitant and the doubt is still here and on one level it feels like a gasp of crystalline fun but on a lower level it feels like trying to find the joy on a holiday with someone you're completely in love with but whose well of pain is catching up to rival it. And as if to signal its undelivered promise, Sabrina waits 'til the album's ultimate climax, "Without Crying/Without Hiding", to mirror the sentiment.
You break up. It's tragic. Three weeks later you get back together. You bring lists of promises and you'll-do-it-right-this-times and it's blissblissbliss. And then the momentum of relief wears off and you both have to Try again and the Trying seems like it seems like too much.
Then on "I'll Always Be There" the dialogue vacates. There are a few credits-roll songs on Destiny, tracks that feel like codas to an emotional segment of the album. "I'll Always Be There": Is it a promise or resignation that escape, that moving on, that Something (Genuinely) New is harder than it seems? And then, so, "I'm Giving You Up" feels like the post-credits scene. You waited in the theatre long enough to see this. The final, fatal realisation it's over. Where most DJ Sabrina songs pulverise their samples with other samples, rattling them against each other like vibrating molecules until they cool into some new substance, "I'm Giving You Up" leaves its source relatively intact. It's the mourning period, the morose. Hang up the phone, go out alone. Nothin' left to say. Love's a heartache. Don Johnson, you said it brother. Voice all echo-y and distant. Creeps and crawls its way through the broken pieces until the ground is firm enough to... stand? The drums break wickedly. Sunlight! Sabrina, there's pain behind those eyes. And subtly, subtly the BVs fade in and in and in: "Giving up? Giving up? I'm givin' up." But this time it's not resignation -- it's release.
What DJ Sabrina's songs are "about" is entirely up to you. Let's talk about the artwork. Lotta noise has been made of how many bits the artwork is i.e. what era it really represents in binary increments (it's 8-bit! It's 16-bit! It's 64-bit! It doesn't make one damn bit of difference!) but let me suggest it's not about its colour depth but the oily and slightly misshapen qualities that mirror the amorphous qualities of her music. The not-quite-Melissa-Joan-Hart of it all, the pointing at a recognisable fact of life (sitcom witch, a brutal heartbreak, etc) with its running edges and bleeding colours that capture the distortions of memory and perception. The messy and sometimes ungenerous portraits of retrospection that nevertheless come out as vivid, vibrant, distinct, indelible parts of an identity.
Some of the most personal albums are "intimate", quiet-sounding records (sentimentally if not sonically) that feel like an artist speaking to you like a friend, or speaking for you like the friend you might not be to yourself. The intimacy of DJ Sabrina's records isn't in quietness but in its recognition - actually, its celebration! - of not-quietness, of the ways in which love forces its way into your life through the insistence of friends, dance, talk, music. Anyone touched by the transcendence of house music, comfort television, late night radio, and selective taste knows how appropriate it is that DJ Sabrina brings these arms to bear to remind you of this truth.
You break up. It's tragic. You spend weeks trying to remember who you were and you'll spend months more. A friend tells you they're hosting a radio show and wants to play music to make people feel better. You end up sending them 14 songs by DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. You're gonna share this with someone. You're gonna share this with someone.