There is a particular kind of electro that still smells like warm circuitry. Not the preset-pack version. The kind where sequencers feel slightly robotic, the bassline walks like it has somewhere to be, and the whole track sits in that sweet spot between a late-night club and a sci-fi title sequence. Shook’s new single Ultra Magnetic lives right there.
It is the third single from Arcana, his sci-fi concept album, and a part-two evolution of Space Rock Funk. The brief from the artist is simple and honest: dark synth funk, deeper electro-funk territory, old-school Daft Punk Homework-era energy, built entirely on vintage analog synthesizers. No AI. Hand played in the studio. That last part matters more than a press-release flourish. You can hear the hands.
Robotic sequencers lock in first. Then the funk groove arrives, not as a sample pack loop but as a living thing with a little swing and a lot of voltage. The production stays lean and physical. Filters open and close like a door in a corridor. The mood is cinematic without turning into soundtrack wallpaper. If you have been following the current wave of analog-first electro, synthwave, and nu-disco, this is the lane that still rewards actual synthesis instead of nostalgia cosplay.
Jasper Wijnands records as Shook from the Netherlands. His work sits between memory and the future, inspired, in his words, by timeless forces such as love, change and art. The palette runs from 70s and early 80s synth-pop, disco and funk through anime and futuristic soundtracks. Classical training, Asian and Western roots, and years of record-shop digging all sit under the surface. Over more than a decade he has moved freely between synthesizer funk, city pop, ambient, dancefloor electro and nu-disco.
The network around him is not accidental. He has collaborated with Legowelt, the Den Haag electronic pioneer, and with Shinichiro Yokota of the Japanese house underground. Hideki Matsutake, a.k.a. Logic System of Yellow Magic Orchestra, has spoken about his work. That YMO lineage makes sense the second the sequencers start talking. His music has also travelled further than most bedroom-to-Bandcamp stories. Milestones, from the 2014 album Spectrum, landed in the first episode of Netflix’s Better Call Saul. The track Always became a personal anthem for NASA astronaut Christina Koch, who learned it on the International Space Station keyboard and played it for her husband during her record-breaking mission. She has since flown around the Moon on Artemis II. Shook has been looking for the place where memory and the future meet for a long time. Space, it turns out, found him first.
Ultra Magnetic does not try to cash that story in. It just continues the universe. Arcana is a concept record with vinyl pre-orders already open on Bandcamp. In a year when a lot of electronic music is either hyper-digital or algorithm-smooth, a fully analog, hand-played electro-funk single feels like a small act of resistance and a better night out.
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What do you think of this analog electro-funk direction? Does Homework-era energy still hit in 2026, or are you living fully in the future? Drop it in the comments.
