This Week in House: Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Josh Butler & Steve “Silk” Hurley

Dance music is a broad group of genres, and anyone that calls themself a super fan knows that boiling it all down to just EDM only serves to ignore its sweeping diversity. Our weekly “This Week In” columns spotlight the wider sub-genres of dance music by focussing on the best new tracks, mixes, and classic songs that make the genres so compelling. 

Welcome to your new home for hot new (and classic!) house music, This Week in House Music! Every Monday, we’ll be serving up one fresh new house track, a recent mix, and one classic track from the vaults to keep you grooving all week. (Festival Insider also has you covered on new techno, drum and bass, bass music, and hard dance, running every Tuesday through Friday, respectively.)

House music was born in the early-80s in DIY home studios of Chicago using Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines and other analog gear in inventive new ways. An innovative response in the wake of the racist disco backlash (literally) ignited at Comiskey Park by radio DJ Steve Dahl in July 1979. 

The upbeat four-on-the-floor rhythms echoed through Chicago and New York warehouses and clubs, making their way to London. By the early-90s, not unlike its precursor disco and funk, house music had found its way into almost every corner of the earth and onto the pop charts.

Over the forty-plus years since house has been giving us life, it has birthed many subgenres, including acid, deep, tech, progressive, organic, and Afro. This weekly column will celebrate the freedom of house’s roots and cover any tracks that fall under its groovy umbrella.

“Blood In The Snow,” Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (March 30, Nice Age)

Orlando Higginbottom, a.k.a. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, is back with his first original track of 2022, “Blood In The Snow,” the lead single for his first full-length album in a decade, When the Lights Go, due this summer on his Nice Age imprint. The five-minute track opens with brooding synths that pulse throughout, only briefly giving way for the British electronic artist’s vocals to make their entrance around the minute mark. “How much longer / before the dam begins to break? / Crashing water, I fill my lungs and levitate,” he sings on the deep, haunting song.

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Hot Since 82 Presents: Knee Deep In Sound with Josh Butler (March 31)

For the fourth installment of Hot Since 82’s Knee Deep In Sound Mix Series, “featuring friends of the label,” Josh Butler serves up an hour of banging, upbeat house jams. The Manchester-based DJ/producer opens the killer set with “Epsilon” by James Harcourt, into “Get Hyped (Lewis Boardman Remix),” and his gorgeous melodic number with Mark Jenkyns and Mizbee, “Moments in Time.” Perfection.

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“Jack Your Body (1986 Club Mix),” Steve “Silk” Hurley (2016, originally released 1986)

If we’re talking classic Chicago house, we have to talk about jack, or jacking, an energetic dance that involves bouncing at your knees and thrusting to the beat. Chicago producer and vocalist Steve “Silk” Hurley is one of house music’s forefathers, and his 1986 classic “Jack Your Body” is a perfect song to jack to and take you back to the energy of those early Chi-town warehouse raves. The lively 808-filled bop was the first house track to hit No. 1 on the UK pop charts and featured on the Chicago local news. The 1986 club mix version featured above preserves the energy and vibe of the original and was released as part of S&S Records’ 2016 remix package of the iconic track.