Daniel Pineda - Landlocked (2026)

Club Romantico salute an unsung pioneer of modern club movements, Daniel Pineda ov Nguzunguzu - a producer of early Kelela and the short-lived Future Brown with Fatima Al-Qadiri - with a handful of lush yet venomous originals plus a Kelman Duran link-up

You can’t talk about the 2010’s club sound without acknowledging Daniel Pineda’s influential, border-smudging productions as half of Nguzunguzu, with Asthma Maroof. Along with the likes of Total Freedom, Pineda’s work ushered the freshest wave of syncopated club music from the US at a time when Night Slugs (and Numbers.) and its American division, Fade To Mind, were hybridising UKF with Latin house, Jersey and B-More club and a groundswell of virulent Global South rhythms that began to percolate Westwards via blogs (this was the salient stuff when talking about blog-era, not the fidget-house pish) by the end of the ‘00s.

Pineda’s ‘Landlocked’ firmly marks his return to a scene he sowed nearly decades ago, swerving from the heart-in-mouth pads and Dutch Bubblers-type groove to ‘De La Mama’, a a slower variant of that tresillo formula in ‘Gritos’, via the full-bore 145BPM intensity of ‘Fuerte’, a video clash-meets-Ballroom romp ‘Heavy Fact’, and the pneumatic subs and drill clack of a ‘Quema’ primed for carnival season. Another crucial bridge of Global South and Western club music, Kelman Duran tags in on the EP’s slowest, heaviest, ‘Loko 4 Eva’, strapped with below-belt quake and hardest drum cadence bound to get crowds slapping the walls.