If the past few years have been a long, sleepless winter, Lakeway’s "I’ve Missed The Sun" arrives like the first golden shard of morning piercing through a half-closed curtain. Released on the first day of spring (March 20, 2025), this debut LP is more than just a collection of beats - it’s a sonic coming-of-age, a journal written in basslines, breakbeats, and the echoes of personal reckoning.

Lakeway, a shape-shifting producer known for bending grime, jungle, and electronica into his own unpredictable formulas, has spent years crafting this album - sometimes reluctantly, sometimes cathartically, and at one point even deleting all the project files, as if trying to escape the weight of his own creation. But like the sun itself, some things insist on rising.

The album’s structure mirrors its emotional arc, opening with "The Beginning", a brief yet cinematic prelude that sets the stage for the journey ahead. Then comes "Tone Deaf", a track that instantly hits with surgical precision - grimey synths scraping against rolling percussion, a controlled chaos that Lakeway wields with finesse.

The title track, "I’ve Missed The Sun", is where the album’s heart beats the loudest. It’s a radiant, melancholic anthem, balancing euphoria with nostalgia, like stepping outside after a storm and inhaling the electric air. "My Mistakes" and "Let Me Go" push deeper into the album’s emotional core, layering skittering drum patterns with introspective melodies.

There’s also a cinematic quality to tracks like "Alone Again" (featuring Becca Jane Grey), where vocals drift over pulsating low-end frequencies, and "Dial Up", which feels like a warped transmission from an era when buffering internet speeds dictated the rhythm of teenage angst. "Shotgun" and "Limelight Junkie" bring us back to the club with relentless momentum, while "NSE W" and "Long Way Home" steer us toward the reflective, the spacious, the kind of sound design that makes you stare out of train windows, lost in thought.

And then, as if to remind us of the duality at play, the album closes with "Under The Lights", an expansive, neon-lit finale that leaves us somewhere between a dancefloor epiphany and a solitary midnight walk.

Lakeway doesn’t just produce music; he extracts moods and bottles them in beats. You can hear the weight of the last few years in these tracks - the isolation, the frustration, but also the glimmers of connection, the need to move, to shake off inertia. Fans of Machinedrum, Rockwell, A.Fruit, and Overmono will find plenty to love here, but "I’ve Missed The Sun" doesn’t sit neatly in any one lane. It’s a shapeshifter, just like its creator.

Some albums are seasonal, tied to a moment in time. Others become soundtracks for transitions, for those periods when you’re neither fully in the past nor quite in the future. This is one of those albums. It’s the first day of spring, and the sun is finally back. Let it in.