Santangelo experiments on anarchic multi-movement epic “mAdWorld”

As their long-teased album, AdWorld, finally makes its way to release this month, "mAdWorld" provides one final preview into the aural universe Santangelo has been carefully crafting over the last few years. The genre-hopping artist has released several tracks slated for AdWorld since 2021’s “Bliss”, and with "mAdWorld", Santangelo has created one of their lengthiest songs in some time. A constantly transforming, five-minute odyssey which moves adeptly from spaced-out hip-hop with traces of ambient music, through a drum and bass breakdown, and beyond.

Santangelo notes that the song was written in a particularly “chaotic time” in their life, where he and his friends were “gambling a lot,” and that he tried to “bottle that feeling” of desperation in the track. This shows in the track’s manic structuring, barely leaving itself a moment to breathe. Even in its quieter moments, it maintains an almost ominous quality, as if at any moment it could swerve back into another burst of noise.

Throughout "mAdWorld", Santangelo and collaborator Quiet Luke have interlaced various odd-ball samples – to the point where they have a running joke that “a college essay could be written on the sound effects we used alone.” Amongst the most audible are air raid sirens which reappear throughout, and he also nods towards “video game loading samples,” and even samples of the cryptocurrency website Pancake Swap – no doubt familiar to the artist, who has dabbled in the ever-contentious world of NFTs with his AdWorld NFT game, notably intended to be part of the same wider artistic project as his album of the same name.