dvsn: "The Line"
On Drake’s Nothing Was the Same track “Too Much”, singer Sampha starts things off with a stark piano-and-vocal intro that sounds like a glorified iPhone recording. After an air of lo-fi intimacy is established, the production turns from grainy black-and-white to full-spectrum color, Drake enters, and those Sampha vocals take their place as squeaky background samples. It’s a neat trick—calculated studio transparency that doubles as mood-setting manipulation. “Too Much” was co-produced by Paul Jefferies, aka Nineteen85, who also had a hand in “Hold On, We’re Going Home” and “Hotline Bling”. At this point, he is Drake’s not-so-secret weapon when it comes to crossover smashes. He also produced “The Line”, a slow-motion R&B ballad by shadowy new Toronto act dvsn that doubles down on the sonic techniques of “Too Much” by spreading its musical reveal across seven exquisite minutes. What begins as just another anonymous, ’90s R&B-inspired SoundCloud trifle snowballs into a gospel-choir-backed shot at the Slow Jam Hall of Fame and earns its place in the same sentence as D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)”.
“The Line” is an exercise in modern R&B’s ongoing adventures in deconstruction. It takes a sensuous formula we all know and love—the one employed on, say, Boyz II Men’s “On Bended Knee”—and strips it down for parts before rebuilding it as something skewed. Fittingly, the unknown singer at the center of the song is at once familiar and novel; he sounds like any number of heartthrobs pining for affection, though his desires have an unexpected depth and sweetness compared to Chris Brown’s shameless salaciousness or the Weeknd’s self-loathing boorishness. The “line” in question is the one that divides two people before guards are let down, before a wary tumble into love becomes an exhilarating free fall. As the song fills out, so do the hopes of its messenger, and by the time the choir kicks in, all lines have been convincingly crossed; old devotion is made bracing and real once again.
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