Michael Cardamone is a 52-year-old Philadelphia attorney who owns his own law firm, trains Muay Thai, BJJ, Karate, and Aikido, and started making EDM last year after decades of playing drums and messing around with synthesizers. He releases music under the name DJ Cards, and “Forward” dropped on June 5th as his latest uplifting trance single. The backstory isn’t incidental – it’s essentially the whole thesis of the track, which is about momentum, perseverance, and leaving doubt behind. There’s something genuinely fitting about a man in his fifties, decades into a serious career, finally putting all the pieces together and making music specifically about moving forward. The track is instrumental, letting the melody carry the emotional weight rather than relying on vocals, and it’s designed for exactly the kind of late-night, high-energy, head-down moments the title suggests.
The energy is palpable, and the momentum is unironically very “forward.” It has a flavor of EDM that’s actually considered a bit outdated – it’s like the trance music of the early 2010s, like those classic A State of Trance sets that Armin van Buuren used to close out with at four in the morning. The soaring melodies, the euphoric build-and-drop structure, the driving rhythms underneath it all – this is trance in the purest sense of the word, chasing that specific feeling of release that the genre was built around before it splintered into a hundred subgenres. Whether that reads as nostalgic or simply timeless probably depends on your relationship with that era of electronic music, but Cardamone commits to it fully, and the production holds up.
“Forward” doesn’t reinvent anything, and it doesn’t seem to want to. What it does is execute a specific emotional experience with conviction – and for a genre where conviction is half the job, that counts for a lot.