Comfort in Chaos - A Review of John Summit’s First Album

2024’s greatest dance album is as much a tour de force as it is a farewell to arms

Ask a purist and they’ll tell you: there’s two genres of dance. There’s dance for the average person, catchy tracks pumped out like a conveyer belt of kicks to mix in nearly every scenario imaginable. Then, there’s the dance that goes beyond that. The dance that doesn’t just play over the speakers on the floor, but embodies the feeling of being there in the crowd. It doesn’t take a purist to understand that the earliest tracks from John Walter Schuster, better known by the world as the ubiquitous John Summit, were the former dance. But somewhere on the road from accountant to headliner, Summit developed an innate sense of bounce that no other act in dance has been able to replicate, and he does it with such ease it’s no surprise how far he’s come. It’s even less surprising to see where he’ll go.

Comfort in Chaos is as much a tour de force as it is a farewell to arms. Summit told numerous publications that he often feels like he’s two people. If you knew John Schuster, you’d never imagine him being up on stage next to Subtronics mixing the nastiest versions of some of the most beloved tracks. But if you knew John Summit, you’d never imagine him describing himself as “introverted” or “shy.” Comfort in Chaos is an attempt at reconciling those two personas into one: the John Summit who feels at home in tracks like “EAT THE BASS” and the John Schuster who feels at home in tracks like “palm of my hands”. But it is undeniably a departure from anything Summit has released before, from the sheer scale of it, to the minutiae of the tracks, to the way the keys change and the synth pulls fade; it’s all different, yet it's all still quintessentially John Summit.

The album opens with the title track, and it’s two minutes of pure atmosphere. “Comfort in Chaos,” with repeated looping chops, transitions into what at the time I thought to be Summit’s most euphoric track (later in the album, I was proved wrong). “Tears” with Paige Cavell starts with piano– an utterly salient sound in Summit’s discography– that builds until the first drop, where Summit turns away from Melodic House and bends the rules of music to the extreme. He didn’t write “Tears” for the dance floor, he wrote it for the people who blast his songs at just before sunrise when the world falls away and nothing is left.

Keep in mind, we’re only ten minutes into the album.

The next track, “Stay With Me,” doesn’t drop the energy. Summit pushes briefly but boldly into drum ‘n’ bass with a song co-written by Tyler Coombs (who you might know better as Of The Trees). The track is pure simplicity, with only one scale ringing out over an absolute bullet train of a drumline. But the transition between “Stay With Me” into the first Hayla feature on the album is something out of legend. “Shiver” is the first track to start with vocals and lead into the music, but somewhere between the first drop and the last bridge, Summit promises to the listener that for the rest of the album, he and the listener are one. The energy doesn’t drop, the synths don’t fade, and it is, in every sense of the term, pure sound.

The rest of the album is a blur with chords to make you cry and co-writes to get you sobbing. “EAT THE BASS” is the moodiest track on the album– not in the way that “FE!N” is moody on UTOPIA, but the way that “FE!N” might be moody on The Beatles’ White Album– and is a subtle callback to the earlier Summit tracks like “Chicago.” “comedown” is sea-shanty adjacent, and although the weakest track on the album, it’s a strong track in its own right. “Resonate,” featuring Julia Church and the ethereal Kaskade, is Summit through and through until Kaskade takes the wheel before the first drop and we’re thrust into the relentless drums of techno. I won’t bore you with the rest of the details of the album when I can just tell you this: every second of every track is used to the max to create what is dance of all types’ greatest album ever.

I truly mean it. John Summit has in 44 minutes convinced me something two years of listening had only barely begun to: John Summit has the power to be the greatest electronic artist of all time. It’s not enough to just say Comfort in Chaos makes him the greatest electronic artist of all time, but it is enough to say that there is a very good chance that with maybe two more albums, a few more years, and a little bit more Summit, he could show the world what he can do.

Until John Summit becomes the Greatest Electronic Artist of All Time, I’ll just leave him with this: Comfort in Chaos is dance’s greatest album of 2024.

Rating: 9.5/10