Laurent Wery Lets the Bass Line Carry Good Old Days and That Is Why It Works
The Belgian DJ and Xerxes-K Build a House Record That Refuses to Shout
The first thing to notice about Good Old Days is what the arrangement does not do. There is no aggressive beat attack. No wall of synths arrives to announce the chorus. The keys stay soft and the rhythm stays loose. The weight sits on a bass line that never gets louder than the vocal. Laurent Wery released the single on 13 December 2024 through BIP Records, with Xerxes-K on the vocal.
Good Old Days is in the playlist below, and Laurent Wery’s coverage history sits on his artist profile. It reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Give it a spin, then carry on.
The Wave Laurent Wery Came Up In
Belgium produces club records at a rate no country its size should manage. Wery came up inside that system rather than around it. Born in Aalst in 1975, he held residencies in the major Belgian clubs before he produced anything. He still runs a DJ store in Antwerp. That order matters. Someone who plays records for a living before making them builds differently. They have already watched what empties a floor.
His catalogue tracks the shift. First came the solo single My Sound, on 14 February 2009. It reached number 20 on the Belgian Ultratop chart. Then the debut album Ready for the Night followed on 19 July 2010. Salva Mea arrived in January 2011. That September came Hey Hey Hey (Pop Another Bottle), with Swift K.I.D. and Dev. It charted in more than ten countries, reaching number 2 in Australia and number 14 on the US Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart.
Good Old Days is not chasing that record. Instead the lane here is vocal house with a retro synth palette. The palette is specific: synthwave motifs, bright expansive pads, a mid-tempo groove, and keys that behave like a hook rather than a texture.
Why the Restraint Is a Programming Decision
Reviewers landed on the same components independently. Rotate Magazine listed retro synthwave elements, groovy rhythms, catchy keys and the bass line as the load-bearing parts. Similarly, Music Evolution called the production polished and retro-inspired. Meanwhile Good Music Radar catalogued what is missing. No aggressive beat attacks. No intense synth clouds. Just chill beats and soft rhythms holding a contemporary house atmosphere together.
That absence is the technique. If the synths never peak, the bass line has room to be the melodic event. As a result the track survives a full-volume system without turning into noise. It also keeps the arrangement inside a narrow dynamic band. That is what lets a record sit under conversation in a bar and still function on a floor.
The consequence shows up in the format. The radio edit runs three minutes and sixteen seconds. There is also an Extended Mix, and that is where the record does its real work. Given twice the runtime, a producer can let the groove establish itself before the vocal arrives. A DJ also gets a usable front and back for transitions. That version landed on DJ’s 12″ Club Tunes 2024: The Best Of, a compilation aimed at the people mixing it.
The Vocal, the Compilations and the Adjacent Acts
The vocal is the other half of the design. Xerxes-K is the artist Khashayar Sharifian Attar. He handles far more of the process than a featured singer usually does: production, lyrics, recording, singing, songwriting, mixing and mastering. His own work moves between melodic house, pop, future bass and synthwave. He has also drawn support from Andrew Rayel and Aly & Fila. On this record the effect is a vocal recorded to sit inside the mix rather than over it. That is consistent with everything else here.
Wery has been direct about the brief. “Creating ‘good old days’ was a journey into the vibrant sounds of Commercial Pop and House,” he said of the track. The two have carried on working together since. Beautiful Face followed in 2025, with its own official video.
Four Rooms, One Tempo
The compilation trail shows where the record actually landed. Besides the DJ compilation, Good Old Days was picked up for Miami Music Week 2025 and WMC 2025. It also appeared on Apres Ski Hits 2025 and Top Hits 2024 The Best Of. Those are four different rooms: an American dance-industry week, a winter holiday circuit and a mainstream year-end pool. A track that works in all four is doing something deliberate about tempo and dynamic range.
For listeners mapping the adjacent shelf, the nearest names are melodic and vocal-led rather than peak-time. Lost Frequencies is the obvious Belgian reference. He built a career on restrained melodic house with a vocal at the centre. Purple Disco Machine is the closer match for the palette. His records run on a bass line and a retro keyboard rather than on volume. Sam Feldt covers the vocal-house middle ground, where song and groove carry equal weight. None of those make Wery derivative. They mark out the shelf the record was built for.
Finally, two years on, the case is the same as it was in December 2024. This is a house record engineered to work at conversation volume and at system volume. That is a harder brief than it sounds. The restraint that makes it unremarkable on a first listen is exactly what keeps it in rotation.
Where to Hear Laurent Wery and Good Old Days
Stream the single on Spotify and Apple Music, watch the official video, and find the wider catalogue on Deezer.
For tour dates and new releases, follow him on Instagram, Facebook and X. Bookings and the back catalogue sit on his official site.
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