Lockerz is a Welsh producer who came up through drum and bass before deciding the swung two-step was a more interesting place to spend a decade. He is trained in jazz piano. You can hear it on every record. The harmonic vocabulary on his Garage Shared releases is doing something most UK garage producers either cannot or will not attempt: actual chord changes, voiced like someone who has spent time at a piano with the lights off.
"Pulse" was the track that announced the project properly. The drums are correct, the bass weight is correct, and then the chords arrive and reroute the whole record. "Burning" — premiered by DJ Mag earlier this year — extends that approach into something closer to a vocal house record. "How it Was" is the most reflective thing he has put out. "Hitbox" is the one for the floor.
The piano problem
UK garage built itself on a particular sample logic in the late nineties. Pull a soul record, chop it, run it under a two-step. The form is durable but it has a limit, which is that most producers don't write the chords themselves. Lockerz writes them. That single fact is the reason Garage Shared put a debut album cycle and a tour around him. It is the reason BBC Radio 1Xtra keeps running his edits. The genre needs harmonic writing again.
Where it lands
The debut album is cued for summer. The records leading into it suggest something that will sit comfortably alongside Hannah Diamond's pop work, Conducta's Kiwi label, and the small group of producers genuinely advancing UK garage's vocabulary. Start with "Pulse." Stay for "How it Was."
Allastair Voss
