Hot Since 82 puts both sides of 'Obsessions' on one single

Vanessa Nguyen · 14 July 2026

Hot Since 82 built Knee Deep In Sound, his own label since 2014, because nothing else fit what he was making. Over the decade since, that's flipped: the sound he was making room for is now the one a run of house producers build from, and the climb from a label built to shelter his own groove to one that set the blueprint for it has been fast, not gradual. On 10 July it did something it doesn't do often. It put two singles that came out weeks apart back in the same room. Track one is "Life's Too Short". Track two folds in "Shaded" as an edit, and that pairing is the real story here. Obsessions, the album carrying both tracks, won't pick a lane. It's going to run rave reverence and straight-ahead dancefloor pleasure side by side, and this two-tracker makes that explicit before the album itself lands.

"Shaded" was first out, on 12 June, and it rebuilds Shades Of Rhythm's "The Sound Of Eden," the Peterborough group's own hit from the rave summer of 1991, from their run on ZTT Records and their commercial peak. It earns that deference. The vocal hook survives close to intact. So does the chord line. What's changed is the frame around them: heavier low end, a tighter kick, both built for rooms that never heard the original the first time it went round. The single landed days after Padley's Beatport Live sunset set from Horizon 22, London's highest viewing platform, which is the kind of booking that makes revisiting an early rave record read as gratitude rather than a marketing move.

"Life's Too Short" is the newer half, and it works from the opposite instinct. Padley made it six years ago and left it off his previous album because he didn't think it was finished. He never went back to fix it. What arrives now is the same recording, piano chords stacked high under a vocal hook that never tries to be subtle. Breakbeats loosen the four-on-the-floor underneath. Where "Shaded" looks back at a scene, this one looks sideways at a mood, uncomplicated pleasure, the kind a producer this far into a run sometimes decides is worth more than being clever. It's the stronger track of the two.

Padley said as much when the single dropped. He wasn't dressing it up. It's a record he was glad to finally get out, built to put a smile on a listener's face and get a room moving without asking permission first.

Obsessions runs nine tracks, out on the same label, and Padley has said it's the first album of his career he actually finished and handed in on time. He wrote it through a stretch of constant touring, and its themes turn on self-acceptance, which goes some way to explaining why "Life's Too Short" sat unreleased for six years until it finally fit somewhere. It's also his first full album since 2020's Recovery, and the rollout has been unhurried on purpose. "In The Air," a collaboration with Avision, opened the campaign in February, and Obsessions has taken six months to reach September from there, single by single.

Both cuts on this release are edits, not the extended mixes the original singles carried. 2:40 and 3:02, trimmed down to something you can drop into a set without planning the transition three records out. We'll take that as Knee Deep In Sound building this one for DJ boxes, not for background listening, and it's the right call for a two-tracker that exists to make an argument rather than to be somebody's next add.

Putting "Shaded" and "Life's Too Short" together here, instead of letting each single make its own case alone, is Knee Deep In Sound saying what Obsessions wants to be before the album gets the chance to. A record that treats rave-era reverence and pure club pleasure as one project.