As the first bit of music to be released from Highly Contagious, the newly minted record label led by the team behind the emerging publication, it’s hard to know what to expect from Purple Dye. However, with the zine’s mission of celebrating music and art that you just need to share with others, it’s fitting to have a debut release as instantly infectious as this.

Fluid yet equally disorientating, ‘Time’ plays as an immersive excursion through heady RnB, lo-fi pop and dreamy psychedelia, all tied together in an evocative nostalgic sheen. Anchored by a restless groove, the track instantly plunges us into a swirl of textures and rhythms - first with some gleaming guitar work, before an exuberant backbeat emerges as layers of radiant piano and saxophone spiral around. Far from taking the limelight, Alex’s vocals drift in and out, trading between smooth croons and sticky auto-tuned hooks to add an enigmatic presence over the track as it unravels. At near six minutes long, ‘Time’ plays like a constant evolution, the track growing progressively more dizzying with every new melodic idea that emerges to tangle and refract what’s come before, before eventually the soundscape is just heaving with playfulness and vivid colour.

Talking about the track’s construction, Dean explains that ‘Time’ came together through some “happy accidents”, as he shares “I remember after we got a healthy amount of takes, I misplaced a few of Alex’s phrases on the grid and my ears quickly heard an idea for a counter melody. You can hear cuts of his voice, sometimes phonetic and sometimes lyrical, buried in this one but always trying to carve out a hook. This became a theme for the album." It’s an intriguing introduction, and one that gives high hopes for their forthcoming full-length LP Like Ecstasy, which with its impending release at the end of the year might just make it the soundtrack of this coming summer.