[20:20 Vision]

Maya Jane Coles is undoubtedly one of house music’s most prominent rising stars, with an enviable stance one foot in the underground and one edging at more mainstream territory. It’s a stance the London producer completely deserves: her music is simple in structure but executed with an expertise beyond her years and experience. She’s also come a long way since her breakout hit “What They Say,” developing at a rapid pace that’s inspiring by anyone’s standards. It’s easy to hear echoes of that ubiquitous tune in the title track of her 20:20 Vision debut, which suspends a similar scaling chord progression in midair as decentered percussive accents float around it, but beyond the surface-level similarity it’s an entirely different beast and a more mature one at that. Coles avoids outright four-to-the-floor but fashions a shapely groove just as insistent out of free-floating elements and well-placed chord stabs. Heading into more assertive territory, “The High Life” is similarly lithe and slinky, with a filtered sample that feels like rays of sunshine when it breaks out into tinkles of piano and euphoric rushes.

There’s always been a similarity in my mind between the kinda-sorta-deep house that Coles produces and the commercial-friendly house homogenization of Crosstown Rebels, with the barriers of taste and refinement often the dividing line between the two. The other two tracks on the EP prove the point; “Little One” is a perfunctory workout satisfied with just being that, an example of Coles at her most functional, and it recalls recent Maceo Plex or Deniz Kurtel in its blunted, almost hypnotic repetition. The other side of that axis is represented through the pop quotient, which Coles has in spades if we’re to believe her claims that her work-in-progress debut album will be a cross-genre vocal work. “Senseless” gives us one of the first examples of what to expect, the whisper-soft pitter-patter of its twilight chords and hollow percussion are fertile breeding ground for a delicate vocal from Coles. Subtly dueling between house and pop, Coles’ grasp of the duality of melody and rhythm is admirable as she makes one of the least compromising bids for mainstream house music I’ve heard in a long while. Through all this, Coles remains an embryonic talent: aside from her polished sensibilities and tasteful production, her signature sound is still emerging, but she seems like she’s got the skills to go somewhere great. You can chart her development through each progressive release, and while this one isn’t quite perfect, it’s probably the strongest statement she’s made yet. Onward and upward; if there’s more like “Senseless” on the way, it doesn’t really matter what people like us think anyway, because this girl is going to be big.