B-Side Guys

“The river bends / But it don’t break” opens with resilience that immediately reveals itself as futility—the river keeps flowing, sure, but toward what exactly when “the sky’s gone gray / No dawn to wake”? French producer Wax Tailor returns after three years with a track that treats apocalypse as tedium rather than spectacle. After two decades anchoring the international trip-hop scene, seven albums, collaborations with Ghostface Killah and Mark Lanegan, and nearly a thousand concerts worldwide, he’s apparently arrived at the conclusion that we’re all “robots on a program / Goin’ nowhere.”

The production mirrors the lyrical circularity—beats that loop without progressing, samples that repeat without evolving, Tailor’s signature cinematic electro-hip hop craft deployed in service of stasis. “I read the news today / They say it was inevitable” references the Beatles while acknowledging that doom has become background noise, the kind of information you consume with breakfast and forget by lunch. The fever dream metaphor appears twice, but Tailor never grants the relief of waking up. Instead, we get “No lie, no lie, there’s no dawn” chanted like a mantra or warning, repetition as both musical device and existential diagnosis.

What’s striking about “No Dawn To Wake” isn’t its bleakness—trip-hop has trafficked in dystopia since the genre’s inception—but its weary acceptance. Tailor isn’t angry about the robots or the program; he’s documenting the condition with the detachment of someone who’s been watching this unfold for twenty years. The track arrives as he prepares for his second US tour in a year, eight shows from Houston to Miami, proof that after two decades and seven albums, he’s still finding new ways to articulate collective exhaustion. For a producer who’s spent his career refining cinematic electro-hip hop into something both atmospheric and precise, “No Dawn To Wake” feels like essential work—capturing the particular gray sky moment we’re all living under, whether we’ve admitted it yet or not.