Sampling the likes of a jungle cat growl, laced tight with a skull-reverberating bass line and a finish that pounds the pavement with acceleration, “fwm” (short for ‘fuck with me’) from New York City’s own Nicknames will fluster you into a fit of dance-fueled rage. My favorite thing about Nicknames is that he’s a master of tension. It feels like “fwm” is playing tug of war between the bounce house beat and brittle vocal that cracks this track like glass to a hammer. Nicknames got his obsession with EDM as a kid growing up in Germany and tacked on a passion for hip-hop and pop that surrounded him after moving to Virginia in middle school.

This pantheon of influences combines into Nicknames’ self-coined genre he calls “fizzy-pop” – a can that explodes when you shake it with pressurized sonics that taste like all the nostalgia of a coke. “fwm” is packing an anthemic punch while still remaining rare and authentic. The fact that Nicknames can balance on the tightrope between the two makes him an artist I have my eye on.