B-Side Guys

Acapulco has always meant two things at once: the glamour of the cliff divers and the resort hotels, and whatever exists underneath that surface. Carlos Salame, the Mexican producer behind Trip Tease, named this track after that city and its wave, and the production carries both registers. The vintage synthesizer stabs and laid-back bassline evoke late-night coastal drives without prettifying what coastline after dark actually feels like.

The collaboration with Alain Vice opens Sex Having Disco EP, which is a deliberate placement. As an instrumental, “Acapulco Wave” has to establish the entire world the EP will inhabit before a single vocal arrives, and the nu-disco and synthwave hybrid manages that without overexplaining itself. The bassline is sensual and dancefloor-ready simultaneously, a combination Salame has been chasing across collaborations with artists including Rhye, Polo & Pan, and Ólafur Arnalds, and here it finds the right balance.

Salame, born in 1991, draws from lo-fi house and techno alongside the more melodic synthwave influences, and those tensions surface in the track’s texture. It isn’t quite clean enough for easy listening and isn’t quite rough enough for a club set. It occupies the space between those contexts, which is exactly where the coastal drive metaphor lives: moving, pleasantly unresolved, the destination still ahead.

As an opener, “Acapulco Wave” does what the best opening tracks do: it tells you what register you’re in without revealing everything the record has to say. The wave arrives. The EP begins.