Some club records do not bother pretending they are anything else. They walk in, clock the room, and start moving people. Paranoid, the new collab from renowned party starter Jakkob and Cardiff cult favourite Local, is that kind of record. It arrives on Dansu Discs with the hallmarks of a modern club anthem: addictive, a little unpredictable, and packed with late-night energy.
Jakkob is the Welsh DJ and producer who has spent more than a decade living inside club culture rather than just visiting it. Promoter, label worker, DJ, then label founder. Kitchen Club started as a series of high-energy, groove-first nights and grew into Kitchen Club Records, where he put his sound engineering and music production degree to work on debut solo cut Rhythm Section. Demand has not been quiet since. There is a Ministry of Sound remix of Herd & Fitz’s Just Can’t Get Enough that piled up over a million SoundCloud streams with barely any push, plus bookings in Ibiza, Australia and New Zealand and festival dates including Hideout and Secret Garden Party. Socials sit well over a million. Playing back to back with Seth Troxler in a local pub sounds like a punchline until you realise it is just another Tuesday in this career.
Local brings the hometown heat. The pitch frames them as Cardiff’s cult favourite, and the pairing makes sense on paper: Jakkob’s party-starter reputation meeting a scene name that already knows how those rooms breathe. Together they tap a familiar club experience and twist it with a tongue-in-cheek edge. That is the trick with good tech house right now. The genre is everywhere again, from warehouse afters to festival side stages, but the records that stick are the ones that feel lived-in instead of algorithm-polished. Paranoid aims straight at dancefloors, festivals and summer sessions without overexplaining itself.
Musically you are in groove-first territory. Tech house lives and dies on the pocket: drums that keep walking, bass that refuses to sit still, and arrangements that leave just enough space for the room to do the rest. The submission calls it addictive and unpredictable, which is exactly what you want when the clock has gone past two and nobody is checking their phone. No need to invent vocal stories that were not shared. The point of this one is the functional chaos of a proper club cut, the kind DJs can slam in when the floor is already moving and still make heads snap around.
That Dansu Discs stamp matters too. Labels that understand peak-time records give tracks like this a home instead of forcing them into playlist-safe shapes. Jakkob has already shown he can straddle the joke-and-the-serious-career line. The Smash Guy persona built a huge audience; the records and the Kitchen Club nights are how he keeps the credibility. Paranoid sits on that same line: fun enough to shout about, tight enough to actually play.
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What do you think of this pairing? Does Paranoid feel like a summer session record or a 3am closer? Drop it in the comments.
