The new track ‘Amen’ from Parker Gordon is absolutely full of fun. Though when I first pressed play, I wasn’t ready for what it would stir up.

There was a time when this kind of house music was the soundtrack to my life—and then, abruptly, it wasn’t. I had folded it away with other relics from years that I didn’t much want to revisit. The night I found my boyfriend snogging another man in a bar on Curtain Road. The time my friends nearly had to drag me out of The Eagle after too many ‘Vodka Red Bulls’ and not enough sense. The long, chemical-fogged dancefloors where joy and self-destruction blurred into one relentless four-four beat. You know how treacherous music can be; like scent, it can bring back powerful memories of emotionally charged times we’d prefer to shut away.

For a while, dancing stopped feeling like a release. I’d stepped over too many G casualties on dirty, sticky floors. I’d watched too many faces tipped from ecstasy into vacancy. Eventually, I stopped going out altogether. The soundtrack of my youth became something I couldn’t safely touch.

So, when Amen began—preacher-like vocal looping over industrial percussion—I felt resistance before pleasure. But then something shifted. On repeated listens, I found myself surrendering to it. The repetition became hypnotic, mantra-like. The layered loops built with a kind of ecstatic insistence. There’s a glorious, unapologetic pump to it and it has a cacophonous, infectious effect—I am reminded of pumping floor-fillers like O.T. Quartet’s ‘Hold That Sucker Down’—the kind that once filled spaces like SecretSundaze—hidden in gardens behind pubs, millennium era Heaven, Fiction, Action, and beaches in Ibiza—spaces where I had, in truth, once been very happy. The saxophone flickers in with a faintly decadent, almost Charleston/Flapper inflection, as if the ghosts of other eras of excess are winking at us. And halfway through (the extended remix), that heaving side-chain swell hits—resulting in that heaving sort of slow tremolo effect—ritualistic, almost devotional.

What I realised is this: the track doesn’t feel nostalgic. It feels reclaimed.

Yes, my hearing isn’t what it once was—years of dancing too close to the speakers have seen to that—and it took me time to catch all the textures buried in the mix. But when they surfaced, I wasn’t dragged backwards. I was lifted somewhere else. Somewhere steadier. Somewhere kinder to myself. The dancefloor no longer feels like a site of escape or oblivion. It feels, listening to this, like communion.

Turns out, God really is a DJ.

And his name is Gordon.

‘Amen’.

Amen by Parker Gordon (2026) is released by Who Plays and is available on all major streaming and download platforms. Out now.*

Justin David is the author of Tales of the Suburbs, Kissing the Lizard and The Pharmacist. He is also Publisher at www.inkandescent.co.uk