Frankie Alpha – Coma Toes (Yay) (2025)
This review was contributed by Bark PR
There’s a particular alchemy that occurs when electronic production meets genuine emotional autobiography, and Frankie Alpha has captured it perfectly on ‘Coma Toes (Yay)’. Released as the penultimate single from his forthcoming debut EP Fragrances, this deeply personal house track feels like watching summer dissolve through a rain-streaked window – beautiful, melancholic, and impossibly vivid.
The foundation is deceptively simple: live piano melodies that Alpha originally sketched on his Roland FP-90, their organic warmth immediately establishing an intimate sonic palette. But it’s what he builds around these melodic fragments that elevates the track beyond standard house fare. Swing-heavy percussion creates an infectious, slightly off-kilter groove that refuses to settle into predictability, while ghostly harmonies drift through the mix like half-remembered conversations from seasons past.
What truly distinguishes ‘Coma Toes (Yay)’ is its structural audacity. Just as the track establishes its dreamy, late-summer atmosphere, Alpha pivots sharply with a UK Bass-influenced drop that reconfigures the entire emotional landscape. It’s a bold move that could easily fracture the track’s cohesion, but instead it mirrors the song’s thematic core – those sudden shifts in perspective that mark transitional moments, when one season (or state of mind) gives way to another.
Alpha’s multi-instrumentalist background is evident throughout. The interplay between live piano, synthesisers, and meticulously crafted percussion creates textural depth that rewards close listening, yet the track never loses its dancefloor accessibility. Each element serves the narrative: the floating synth parts suggesting drift and dissolution, the swinging rhythms embodying the bittersweet joy of fleeting moments.
As a preview of Fragrances, ‘Coma Toes (Yay)’ makes a compelling case for Alpha’s distinctive artistic vision – one that prizes emotional honesty and sonic adventurousness in equal measure. This is house music with memory embedded in its DNA, a track that understands how specific sounds can transport us to particular emotional states as powerfully as any scent or photograph.
In an electronic landscape often dominated by formulaic builds and drops, Alpha has crafted something genuinely distinctive: a track that feels both intimately personal and universally resonant, capturing that peculiar autumn melancholy when summer’s warmth still lingers in the bones even as the light begins to fade. ‘Coma Toes (Yay)’ is out now, with the debut EP Fragrances following on November 19th.
Find out more about Frankie Alpha on his Instagram and Spotify.
