While the original track featured Rihanna cooing into what felt like an unfinished song, ELJAY’s edit drags Rihanna into the depths of the underworld.
Using the Future Bass and Future R&B style, ELJAY finds a different emotion for “Needed Me” with his flip “U”.
ELJAY doesn’t hold anything back in the first waning milliseconds of “U”. A rattling bass line pierces through the reverbed veil of Rihanna’s voice. Rihanna’s vocals here are pitched in displaced octaves and varied rhythmically for a stereo effect.
A gentle piano lays the framework for the melody when it finally comes in at the 30 second mark. The atmosphere behind Rihanna’s lower pitched vocals are dark, wet, and foggy. The build up grows organically with arpeggiated synths, and a larger crescendo.
At the peak, Rihanna is clearly left alone for a brief second singing “You…”
The drop hits hard and low; sucker punches the track right in the gut.
With the echoed rimshot, ELJAY dives deep and hard. ELJAY masterfully weaves in and out Rihanna’s chopped up vocals with a deadly combination of phased synth chords, and the fuzzy bassline. The percussion is trapstep influenced, and helps highlight the subtle details ELJAY puts in with all the instruments. For the bridge section,
ELJAY pulls back and drops Rihanna’s vocals into the basement where they almost become inaudible.
Quickly, ELJAY builds back up the track. This time when “You” is held, it is scattered and broken up. As the track winds down over the last 30 seconds, it eventually fades into the sky as ELJAY punctuates the track with snap.
