The rapidity of musical genre-mutation has left me in a tizzy more than once.

However, upon discovering Prairies I was shunted into a rigid, chin-scratching trance, whilst racking my brain to remember if I’d heard of ‘Trop-Pop’ before; and if not, then what is it?

Upbeat Trip Hop with steel drums, maybe? Or is ‘Trop’ pronounced as the French do, thus making the genre ‘too much pop’?

Oh, who knows. Fortunately, solid facts abound in Prairies’ songs, such as this one: Hotline is a fabulously off-kilter, dark summer smash.

A simple Bontempi-organ synth-stab has never sounded so menacing and inoffensive all at once. Warm, reedy strings sluice through the verses, and you too will kid yourself that the uneasy feeling in your stomach are actually butterflies of joy. (They aren’t).

Where has this sound come from? I can think of some antecedents – for some reason T.V.O.D. springs to mind, apropos of almost nothing – but in all honesty, Prairies may as well be beamed from the future.

Perhaps they actually are. Excellent.

MORE: soundcloud.com/prairies