Russo feat. Dot Rotten - Bad Tonight

First there was Tinchy, then Tinie - the surge of British rap into the mainstream in recent years has represented one of the most invigorating sea changes in chart music of the past decade. What's more, the new wave of artists breaking through from the urban scene doesn't look spent yet, with promising talent like Dot Rotten gunning to make it big in 2012.

What we like most about Dot Rotten is that he isn't afraid to dabble and mix in amongst the poppiest of pop acts - he's already made a number of forays into the charts in 2011 as part of Gary Barlow's Collective and as a featured artist on Cher Lloyd's Dub On The Track. With Polydor-signed Russo on hand to provide the female vocal hooks, Bad Tonight has all the gloss of a thoroughly mainstream, commercial effort - but its edginess is a sure sign of how far that mainstream, once so reviled by hipsters as 'too safe', has gone to incorporate wider influences.

Blending haunting, disembodied, robotic vocal hooks with a trembling dubstep tinged backing, Bad Tonight sounds as malevolent than the ill omen foreboding of its title. And its Dot Rotten that stands at the heart of it, the rock solid foundation from which the rest of the track towers up from. What's so refreshing about the track is that it pushes a more considered, explorative assault on the senses - at its best moments its a bigger, badder, slicker version of Professor Green's Jungle.

As for Dot Rotten himself, he's worked through beef with the likes of Chipmunk and Wiley to emerge as potentially the brightest star of all three. With the latter two encountering a number of recent chart placing woes, the track is primed for Rotten to lay down a blazing trail with Bad Tonight.

Russo's mixtape Lights Are Off - featuring Bad Tonight - is available to download from her site: http://www.russomusic.co.uk/