Seven minutes and three seconds: Friend Within's 'The Renegade' doesn't just open this selection, it's the longest cut of the 42 and the one dragging the most history behind it. It reworks Wildchild's 1995 'Renegade Master' and floated around online from late 2012 before Method Records — Disclosure's label — gave it an official release in 2013. That booming, bouncy bassline under the original vocal shaped a good chunk of the vocabulary bass house still speaks today, and hearing it at the top of the list works as a statement of intent: this is about lineage, not novelty.
The OWSLA triangle
Three cuts here carry the OWSLA stamp — 'Midnight Hour' by Boys Noize, Skrillex and Ty Dolla $ign completes the trio — and two of them are living museum pieces. Chris Lake's 'I Want You' arrived as the first taste of HOWSLA, the compilation with which Skrillex's label embraced house in 2017, extending the space-warehouse groove of 'Operator': 125 bpm in G-flat minor with a vocal doing all the heavy lifting in just over four minutes. 'AGEN WIDA', Skrillex's link-up with JOYRYDE, landed in October 2018 as the first single from Brave, the Brit's album; critics at the time highlighted the sum of one's sound design and the other's fresh approach to bass, and it still plays like a controlled collision: 3:19 in B minor without a wasted bar.
That all three heavyweights sit between 125 and 126 bpm says plenty about the genre's centre of gravity, even as the full selection stretches from 96 to 138. And there's a wink that gives the hierarchy away: at slot 35 sits Avi Sic's 'Shake (Like Chris Lake)', a title that turns the man behind 'I Want You' into a unit of measurement. When a selection includes both the artist and the tribute, nobody needs to explain who drew the map: these three cuts are the canon, and the other thirty-nine orbit around them.
Sources: Complex · Billboard · Wikipedia · EDM.com
