It’s more than just dance music, and he’s more than just a techno DJ from Detroit. In the past eleven years Matthew Dear has created his own record label, produced a slew of the most infectious house tracks of the decade, started a critically acclaimed band, and had enough inspired leftovers to release fresh material under three, count them three, separate aliases. Now, he returns to the masses with 'Black City'', his new album complete with a computer and creativity.

Dear has an exuberant amount of talent, and has accomplished something many artists fail at: growth. This isn’t the same Matthew Dear that told us to put our hands up for Detroit at the turn of the millennium. This version has imagined a decrepit city drenched in nightfall and soot, inhabited by (according to his website) “desperate cases, lovelorn souls, and amoral motives.” Black City is the soundtrack to said metropolis. His voice is both sensual and sinister as he croons in a tone somewhere between Prince and Matt Berninger; and the amount of bass line funk provides a record setting amount of head nods.

Dear opens the gates to his Black City with “Honey,” a foggy slow motion strut that rises and falls with a cacophony of horns and echoes, and then pays our cover to the lounges and discos with the glitchy “I Can’t Feel,” and the irresistible, “Little People (Black City).” The album culminates with “You Put a Smell on Me,” a delicious collection of blips and handclaps that reek with seduction as Dear persuades you to “take a ride in his big black car.” “Monkey,” puts you in some sort of ritualistic dance-like-state with background chants and Dear’s hypnotic drawl, and as the sun comes up over the dismal Gotham the exit music is cued with the enchanting piano ballad, “Gem.”

With Black City, Dear has trumped even his own previous imagination. He has delivered dance songs with meaning, and emotion. Without a word of description he has given us a tour of his urban village, and all that it stands for and represents. With his music he has painted an epic picture of love, lust, sex, sin, humor, and humility; and he’s done so using just one color.