Tuff Rhythm and dharkfunkh follow up “The Drop” with “Baby Tell Me,” out July 3rd on their own Tuff Groovez imprint. The Birmingham-based duo pairs Tuff Rhythm’s tech house background with dharkfunkh’s deeper club pedigree, the alias of veteran producer Steve Ricketts, who’s released on labels like OFF Recordings and Suara and played rooms like Tresor and Sankeys Manchester. That combined resume shows up in the finished track: house-rooted rhythm work layered under an unmistakably 80s synthwave sheen.
The production leans on the genre’s familiar toolkit, warm analog synth tones, a rolling bassline, and a build-and-release structure that pulls elements back just enough to make the eventual drop land with more weight. It’s a well-worn formula in this corner of dance music, but the execution here is tight enough that it doesn’t feel like it’s just going through the motions. The vocal hook is the track’s clearest asset, simple, immediately singable, and delivered with enough warmth that it earns the “anthem” framing the promotional copy leans on so heavily, even if that framing is worth taking with a grain of salt any single press release full of superlatives deserves.
Where the track works best is in the tension between its retro synth textures and its more contemporary house pulse. Neither element fully dominates; the synthwave palette gives it a nostalgic glow without tipping into pure pastiche, and the rhythm section keeps it grounded as something built for an actual dancefloor rather than just a nostalgia exercise. That balance is a harder needle to thread than it sounds, since leaning too hard into either direction risks either dating the track or draining it of personality, and “Baby Tell Me” mostly manages to avoid both traps. Whether it becomes the season-defining anthem remains to be seen; that’s a claim only a summer’s worth of actual play can really settle. What’s clear on a first listen is that the duo’s chemistry, hinted at on “The Drop,” has sharpened into something more confident here, a track built with a clear sense of where the drop needs to hit and how to get a room there.