Daniel Maunick is a British musician who has been working in the industry for long time as a deejay and producer, producing albums by artists like Marcos Valle and groups like Azymuth and Incognito (featuring his father, Jean-Paul Maunick on guitar and vocals). After all this time behind the scenes, Daniel Maunick finally stepped into the spotlight when he released his debut solo album, Macumba Quebrada, in 2019. Now he’s come back with another full-length album to build upon that foundation with Persistence.

As you might expect given his background working with these musicians, Maunick has mad an album in Persistence that leans heavily into samba, acid jazz, breakbeat, and house, while also working in elements of hip hop, jazz, soul, and funk. It’s a very danceable album, with lots of pulsating, hypnotic rhythms that will keep your hips and feet in motion. However, it’s not an album with a lot of big moments. Maunick chooses to work in a very low key fashion, and by that I mean that while all the tracks on this album will sound great at a late night dance party, he’s not giving you the climatic songs that will get all of the wallflowers on the floor. The flipside to that is that Maunick works in such a subtle and nuanced musical fashion, this is an album full of dance music that you can also listen to when not on the dance floor and really appreciate the grooves and all of the smartly layered compositions that Maunick clearly spent a lot of time crafting with care. There’s a lot of really beautiful melodic work on the album that complements the rhythmic work very nicely, creating a lot of balance that allows the album that versatility in terms of when and where it sounds good to listen to, which you can’t always say for every dance album.

Persistence is a great next step for Daniel Maunick. It’s full of really complex and understated musicianship bringing together a lot of different styles of dance music without making anything sound forced.