Leather dance, feel your heartbeat,
pumping under your boots, in a trance
New York new wave crooner Ronnie Stone has a way of transforming the dance floor into something sacramental. He preaches the gospel of groove, where body and machine fuse into one relentless beat. His latest single, Bound 2 The Rhythm, released through Feeltrip Records, extends this ritual.
The track’s title knowingly winks at Prince’s spelling choices and Grace Jones’s Slave to the Rhythm, yet Stone’s interpretation belongs to a darker, more subterranean congregation, where Stone explores obsession and abandon. He calls his version of the faith “dungeon funk,”a term that feels both playful and perilous, suggesting bondage of spirit as much as of flesh.
Bound 2 The Rhythm unfolds like liturgy. Its groove is deliberate, a ritual pulse guided by plunky synth bass and precise 707 percussion. There’s a sheen of industrial sophistication here Each texture breathes, as if programmed to seduce. The icy tubular bells and jazzy Juno stabs strike like sparks from steel, their precision carrying an almost ecclesiastical control.
Stone’s voice moves through the arrangement with the authority of someone summoning rather than singing. Bound 2 The Rhythm is, as he puts it, “a liturgy of surrender” – a hymn to the ecstasies found in submission. The repeated invocation feels like reincarnation: Jones’s dominion reimagined in a new, nocturnal order. In Stone’s world, pleasure and penitence share the same pulse.
His production, slick, cerebral, and obsessively structured, anchors itself in the legacy of Cabaret Voltaire and the darker grace of Depeche Mode. Yet his precision never sterilizes. The tension between control and chaos, pain and seduction, remains alive in every measure. It’s electronic music as ritual architecture: cool on the surface, burning underneath.
The accompanying video, directed by John MacKay (Cinema Du John) and bandmate Rosa Luna, makes this ritual tangible. Shot entirely on VHS, it follows Stone through Brooklyn’s subways, abandoned tunnels, and basements, a pilgrimage through the underworld of his own creation. Grainy and voyeuristic, it captures the illicit intimacy at the heart of dungeon funk.
Watch the video for Bound 2 The Rhythm below:
