Mechatok’s Wide Awake is the kind of record that creeps up on you—hazy one moment, electrified the next, until you realise you’ve been listening on loop for an hour, half in trance. Parts of the record feel like dancing under fluorescent lights in a VR nightclub, others, like a faded memory, or a long, quiet walk alone at night. It features appearances from Bladee, Ecco2k, Isabella Lovestory, F5ve and Toji, but this isn’t a feature-driven album, each contribution feels deliberate and carefully shaped to fit the album’s mood. The features span a wide emotional and stylistic range, but all pass through Mechatok’s precise and consistent vision.
The album marks Mechatok’s debut solo full-length after years spent quietly shaping the sound of experimental pop and club music. Released via Young, Wide Awake is both a statement of independence and a culmination of Emir Timur Tokdemir’s journey from classical guitarist to one of the most forward-thinking producers of the last decade. Widely renowned for his collaborations with the likes of Drain Gang, Charli xcx, Lorenzo Senni, Evian Christ and many others, Tokdemir has long been a subtle but transformative presence in underground electronic music. With Wide Awake, he steps fully into his own light.
The album has an elastic sense of mood, hovering between glossy, emotionally-turned electropop and stripped-back instrumentals. It opens with “You Don’t Exist”, a track that sets the tone with its hypnotic mantra: “It’s like you don’t exist”. The phrase itself hints at deeper questions that run through the album about presence, identity and what it means to express something real in a world shaped by algorithms. Listening feels like being suspended in place, emotionally disoriented but calm. Elsewhere, moments of brightness puncture the stillness. “Don’t Say No”, a collaboration with Japanese girl group F5VE, is pure digital sugar on the surface, glossy, bright and loopable. But underneath the sugary textures, there’s a hint of emotional tension, as though something’s not quite as sweet as it sounds.
“Expression On Your Face”, featuring heavyweights Bladee and Ecco2k, already a fan favourite following its live debut at Bladee’s Brixton show in December 2024, plays like electropop filtered through the lens of a 2000s Nintendo soundtrack, colourful and glitchy. Ecco2k in the track’s video looks like he’s wandered straight out of Kingdom Hearts, a perfect visual extension of the song’s synthetic glow and hyper-stylised emotion. There’s a distinctly videogame-like quality to the album’s aesthetic as a whole, but instead of trading in nostalgia, Mechatok transforms these cues into something sleek and new.
Not every track is quite as euphoric though. “House of Glass” proves to be calm and translucent, reminiscent of light bouncing off a touchscreen. Towards the end of the project is “When You Left”, a warm, rhythmic and melancholic track that reimagines “Expression On Your Face” via a more introspective light. The energy drains out, leaving something suspended and vulnerable. It could have been the perfect place to end, quietly closing the loop. But instead, Mechatok leaves us with “Sunkiss”, a serene ambient coda built from wind and soft, natural textures. It feels like stepping outside after a long night, the air cool and quiet. It’s a gentle descent from a world that constantly shifts between synthetic ecstasy and reflective calm.
It’s music that moves between worlds, some tracks built for the club, others for private listening. Mechatok captures the kind of feelings you don’t always notice in the moment, but that come back to you later, when things are quiet. What makes Wide Awake so compelling is not just the range of moods it captures, but the way they all feel subtly interconnected, tied together by a playful yet deeply intuitive palette.
Mechatok isn’t offering grand emotional arcs, he’s exploring something quieter, more internal. The album poses gentle but pointed questions about identity, authorship and expression in a hyper-mediated world. Can you exist online without becoming a character of your own making? Can your online persona and your real self live in harmony, or are they always in conflict? Mechatok doesn’t offer answers, but he doesn’t need to. He lives in ambiguity, and that space becomes his most generative creative tool.
There’s something elusive about Wide Awake, a kind of emotional undercurrent that resists being named. Mechatok taps into what Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling”, a shared, lived mood not yet fully articulated, but deeply felt. The album doesn’t explain itself, it just inhabits that emotional space, fluid and unresolved. In the end, Wide Awake doesn’t ask to be decoded, it just asks to be felt. And in that space between clarity and confusion, Mechatok has never sounded more precise.