Rebuke - | Along Came Polly

He leaned over the CDJs, his fingers hovering over the mixer. He needed something that didn't just maintain the rhythm, but fractured it. He reached for a track he’d been tinkering with in his home studio in Letterkenny—a weird, skeletal beast of a song that defied the melodic "business techno" of the era. He pushed the fader.

Weeks later, the "Polly" fever began to spread. Pete Tong picked it up. Then Adam Beyer. Soon, the biggest stages at Awakenings and Drumcode were vibrating to that same unsettling bleep. Reuben sat in his studio, watching clips of 20,000 people losing their minds to a sound he’d created while trying to make something "a bit different." Rebuke - Along Came Polly

It was a pitched-down, distorted snarl, stripped of its original context and repurposed as a dark incantation. The dance floor, which had been a chaotic mess of flailing limbs, suddenly locked into a singular, robotic groove. The track, "Along Came Polly," wasn't a song you danced to ; it was a song that dictated how you moved. It was minimal, almost arrogant in its simplicity, relying on a weird, bleeping lead synth that sounded like a dial-up modem having a fever dream. He leaned over the CDJs, his fingers hovering over the mixer

As the track crested, Reuben saw a guy in the front row stop dead. He wasn't tired; he was confused. He looked at the speakers as if they were speaking a language he almost understood. That was the magic of the track. It was uncomfortable. It was alien. He pushed the fader

By the time the second drop hit—that hollow, echoing thwack that would eventually become Rebuke’s signature sound—the warehouse was no longer a club. It was an engine room. The track bypassed the brain and went straight to the nervous system.