With the release of AKA Primetime’s latest single, “Electric Blue”, I found myself instinctively checking if the heating in my apartment was actually on, or if the sudden warmth was just bleeding out of the speakers. Kelly Appleton, the architect behind this project, has constructed something that tackles the dreaded ‘seasonal slump’ not with a cozy wool blanket, but with a sheer, neon-drenched shock to the system.
The track occupies a sonic space that feels like driving through a Tokyo tunnel in a DMC DeLorean, yet the emotions are raw, human, and rooted in the soil of resilience. Appleton weaves 80s New Wave textures with a production style that refuses to be dusty. It’s sharp.
There is a specific chemistry at play here. Jake Hayden on drums and Sara Farina on bass lock into a groove that feels dangerously close to an accelerated heartbeat, the kind you get when you narrowly miss a train but catch the next one. It anchors the clean, funk-adjacent guitar riffs that slice through the mix like scissors through velvet.
And then there is the voice. JJ Roxx delivers a performance that prowls in the lower registers during the verses, storytelling with a confident strut, before launching the chorus into the stratosphere. It reminded me, strangely, of that split-second feeling when you step out of a darkened theater into the blinding midday sun, a sudden, optical reset that forces you to blink and reassess your surroundings.
“Electric Blue” operates on the premise that the only way out of the grey fog of winter is to run straight through the center of it. It doesn’t ask for permission to be happy; it demands vitality. Is joy a discipline or a reaction? Appleton seems to suggest it’s a rhythm we simply have to relearn to play.
