Rating: 8.0 April 7th EMI Australia Find It: Official Store
A paramount addition to the Skrillex era, Alison Wonderland is Australia’s best kept secret. To be honest, Alex Scholler has always been that, from her days as Whyte Fang to 2012’s Welcome To Wonderland, but her proper debut gift wraps her skill set and unravels a distinctive EDM flavor. At 40-ish minutes, Run finds Wonderland being the life of the party – jacking arena-sized drops with Wayne Coyne (“U Don’t Know”), chaining together tempos against trap-hop (“Carry On”), and even giving Top 40 a try (“Cold”) only to flip it, distort it, and bang a beat right off of your heart valves.
Those tendencies may be a little on the OCD side, but they’re a plus. Wonderland knows what she wants and her Uffie/MØ/Amber Coffman vocal tone makes recordings pop right off the floor, grooving out Majestic Casual strains (“Naked”) and pushing club bangers that twerked straight out of Bowser’s Castle (“Back It Up”). The variety’s a killer, in a Jules Winnfield kinda way, and it levels up when she reworks influences, steps into Diplo territory, and drops fest-ready cuts (“Games”, “One More Hit”) that could castrate the charts. The lack of a ceiling on Run makes it a stimulating addiction and if given time, it’ll hit like LSD and deep dish, and be what it was destined to be: a record for the warehouses.
Listen: “One More Hit”, “Games”, “Ignore” || Watch: “U Don’t Know (ft. Wayne Coyne)”