Hailing from Nevada City, California, Joshua Nathan has recently begun an earnest dive into his musical project, The Rad Hatter. His sophomore release, Downtempo Dragon Princess, provides a lense into his developing craftsmanship, showcasing smooth arrangements, poignant sound design, and a careful, emotive depth.

Downtempo Dragon Princess takes flight with it’s buttery texture interpolation and stereo width, displaying The Rad Hatter’s aptitude for exploiting sonic pockets. The downbeat trio of tracks have a distinct flow to their order, and each composition feels like a piece to a larger trip-hop puzzle; it’s the kind of interloping song writing that sits best with a collection of similar tunes, and that relationship is what makes this EP a wholesale package.

Across each song, core melody elements rest in the center of the stereo image, serving as the bedrock for airy percussion and audio artifacts that float along in sequential phrases. “Ho’oponopono” strikes a particularly reverberant chord, and the salient relationship between it’s muted arpeggios and panned, percussive cocoon fuse together in blissed-out harmony. As the track’s inner elements develop, so too does it’s emotional tug, all summing together in a succinct, sampled quote at the tail of the song: “Once you’ve met someone, you never really forget them. It just takes for your memories to return.”

With so few tracks released into the public sphere, The Rad Hatter’s initial offerings have been strikingly well-written and notably fidelitous. Downtempo Dragon Princess showcases a strong grasp for both production and evolution in songwriting, and begets the feeling that we’ve yet to hear Joshua’s full hand of cards. We’ll be keeping a close eye on The Rad Hatter across the rest of 2020, and highly encourage you to do the same.

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