- Andrew Ryce looks back on one of the pivotal tracks of the post-dubstep era for its tenth anniversary.
- "I was able to quit my day job. 'Another Girl' was 100 percent the turning point."
In a basement studio at the intersection of Rue Clark and Rue Rachel in Montreal, a young producer calling himself Jacques Greene was whipping up tracks that most people assumed came out of London. His first release, the near-ubiquitous "(Baby I Don't Know) What You Want," came out in 2010 on Night Slugs, which was then at the vanguard of club music in the UK capital—so you couldn't really blame anyone for the confusion. But there was something different about Greene's work from the post-dubstep milieu he found himself in.
Sure, there was the neon-streaked synth work and the hooky, pitched-up R&B samples, but his work was more rooted in the four-to-the-floor thump of house. It turned out to be a winning formula. Soon after, he signed to ahead-of-the-curve label LuckyMe (also based in the UK) and released more club hits, including the "The Look" and "Tell Me," before he dropped what instantly became his signature song, "Another Girl," in 2011.
Greene's career-launching song was part of a larger lineage of vocal-heavy club anthems. It was one of those much-anticipated cuts that a group of the most forward DJs were playing out months before it was released. (Think "Sicko Cell.") You can trace the tradition back to when the dubstep scene first started splintering and going down new paths—think James Blake's "CMYK," Blawan's "Getting Me Down," Julio Bashmore's "Au Seve," SCB's "Loss," any number of Deadboy tracks. The sound of underground dance music was defined by these insistent vocal phrases that lodged into your brain and refused to leave.
But "Another Girl" was different, slower, sadder. It was the sigh heard around the world. For one, it's almost a ballad, skating by on a beat that feels more like the pitter-patter of a lovesick heartbeat, with detuned synths adding to the weary feel. It's all topped off by an unforgettable vocal sample of Ciara, not from one of her big hits but from a mixtape-only cover of a Chris Brown song. It builds towards a gushing climax that feels more like a warm hug than a drop, as layers of those bright, woozy synths cocoon the rhythm section. Listening to "Another Girl" is about as close as you can get to capturing the sound of the most hyped-up dance floors at the time.
Of all the club songs to sample Ciara—and there were a lot of them around then—is the pinnacle, especially because of the respect and restraint Greene practices with the source material. It's hard to overstate the influence that contemporary R&B had over club music at the turn of the last decade, and it wasn't only the vocalists. The futuristic, synth-heavy beats of mainstream producers like Polow Da Don, The-Dream and Tricky Stewart were an enormous influence on the sound and texture of these tracks, helping drive the transition away from dark, dank dubstep and garage beats to the technicolor future of post-dubstep.
"In the late 2000s and early 2010s, pop and R&B were fucking excellent," Greene told me over the phone from Montreal, where he recently moved back after stints in New York and Toronto. "I was steeped in these exciting new voices and also dance music in the UK, producers like L-Vis 1990, who were throwing all the rules out the window. Every new Julio Bashmore record, every new Mosca record, was all exciting. I was always thinking about what was happening in the UK."
It was this kind of hybrid, in-between existence that made Greene's music tick. Before he fell in with the UK crews, he was listening to plenty of '90s house, where he learned about vocal chopping, and he had an instrumental hip-hop project in his teenage years called Hovatron (a name he winces at today). He was also something of a protege to Robert Squire, better known as Sixtoo (later known as Prison Garde). Greene grew up in a city primarily known for its MUTEK-adjacent minimal and experimental scenes, not the kind of music he was making. But being based in Montreal allowed Greene a certain anonymity. Aside from its connection to the UK, his music was placeless, taking bits from scenes past and future, from both sides of the pond, all connected thanks to a very active online life.
"My best friends at the time were people I spoke to on the internet, people I was sending tracks back and forth to," Greene said. "To me that never felt unnatural. So many of those relationships are on the internet, and those influences are from the internet. My big introduction to electronic music was from doing a summer internship at the Montreal office of Ninja Tune, where a lot of the music had a UK bent. I was picking up so many Roots Manuva records, and they were listening to Planet Mu records all day in the office."
"Montreal also has this thing where it feels quite apart from the rest of North America," he continued. "It never felt like it would be more natural to have a connection to someone in Toronto than with someone in Glasgow. To me, other Canadian cities felt as culturally different as European cities, and if I was gonna have a relationship with music outside of Montreal, well... Vancouver straight-up feels farther away than London. And there was no unifying sound in Montreal—the big artists living in the city were Tiga, Sixtoo, Amon Tobin. So I felt okay making music that was different than all my peers, because I felt like the city actually celebrated that."
Greene's music usually showed up in sets and on labels surrounded by upbeat, boisterous tracks, but from the very beginning, there was a melancholy thread in his music. He sampled downcast R&B and kept the feelings intact, rather than removing them from their emotional context. That's what makes "Another Girl" so powerful—it's a banger on the verge of tears, thanks in part to Greene's careful manipulation of every single element.
"That wooziness is quite literally just the slightest LFO on the Juno 60," he explained, "And I was running all the drum parts and sounds through the filters of different synthesizers. I'm trying to remember the rack I used. I want to say that the drum parts at the start were running through the external filter on my MS-20. I just tried to go for this delicate, fragile nature—all the elements sound like they're hanging in the balance, like they're just about to break down."
Of course, the clincher in "Another Girl" is that vocal, and the way Greene arranges it. Instead of the manipulated, wordless gasps or disembodied phrases used in so many contemporary club hits, "Another Girl" takes phrases from Ciara's "Deuces" cover and creates a whole new narrative out of it, one that mirrors the song's slowly crumbling facade. The narrative is vague, as Greene admits, but it's there, and each repetition of the title phrase only emphasizes that slight crack in Ciara's voice as she reaches for the higher note.
Though in hindsight it may not be the most obvious club hit, "Another Girl" was a paradigm shift. It encouraged Greene to go full-time with music, and now he's one of the most successful Canadian electronic artists going. It helped predict the direction that UK club music would go in after 2011, as the motley crew of post-dubstep producers started to converge on house. And it remains one of the catchiest "tears on the dance floor" tracks of all time, spurring a legion of successors and imitators who could never quite match the quivering, raw emotion that "Another Girl" captured.
"There's this weird balance of feeling huge and fragile at the same time," Greene says on his breakthrough track. "For the longest time I thought it was unfinished, but the first time I played it out in the club, I realized I didn't need to add anything else. It felt like it changed the gravity of the room, without doing too much. For me, it was an affirmation that the things that I was experimenting with were worth pursuing further. I thought, like, 'I can do this.'"