American hip hop producer and turntablist DJ Shadow has released the second single from his anticipated seventh album, Action Adventure. The new single, ‘You Played Me’, swerves away from the post-punk and new wave sounds of the album’s lead single, ‘Ozone Scraper’, embracing the hot, roomy drums and embodied synth bass of 1980s R&B.
‘You Played Me’ centres on an obscure vocal sample that DJ Shadow discovered on an R&B 12-inch “from around ‘84, ‘85,” he said. “I dropped the needle on an a capella,” he explained in a statement, “and I thought, ‘That actually works.'”
DJ Shadow – ‘You Played Me’
Action Adventure is coming out on Friday, 27th October via Nas’ Mass Appeal Records and DJ Shadow’s own Liquid Amber label. There are no featured vocalists on the 14-track album, a contrast to Shadow’s previous LP, 2019’s Our Pathetic Age, which included guest appearances from Nas, Ghostface Killah, De La Soul, Wiki, Interpol’s Paul Banks, Run the Jewels, Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring and more.
DJ Shadow – aka San Franciscan Josh Davis – began work on Action Adventure at the beginning of 2022. He paid particular attention to the compositional attributes of each song, scrutinising his reflexes to ask, “Which chord progression would be most natural here? And which would be least predictable?” he said.
Find ‘You Played Me’ on all DSPs here.
Further Reading
Listen to DJ Shadow’s Rework of King Gizzard’s ‘Black Hot Soup’
Love Letter to a Record: 700 Feel on RATKING’s ‘So It Goes’
Love Letter To A Record: Bag Raiders On DJ Shadow’s ‘Endtroducing’
