The Cloonee Hellbent Brooklyn event on Saturday, 15 August, was as much a statement of intent as it was a party. Cloonee brought his Hellbent label to Pier 4, 58th Street at Brooklyn Army Terminal, according to Mood Events, staging a waterfront spectacle with fire pillars rising against a Manhattan skyline crowned by the Empire State Building and the Hellbent logo projected above the Statue of Liberty.
The scale of the production, open-air and entirely unashamed, recalled the kind of late-nineties rave aesthetic that has been filtering back into club culture for several years now. There is something almost brazen about projecting your label’s branding onto a national monument, and whether you read it as hubris or confidence, it lodged in the memory.
From the Waterfront to the Skydeck: the Cloonee Hellbent Brooklyn Event in Full
Doors opened at 4:00pm and the evening ran until 10:00pm at the Brooklyn Army Terminal site, per Mood Events. The event was restricted to over-21s, with table reservations available, according to Resident Advisor. That detail matters: it signals an event designed with a degree of intentionality, keeping the crowd focused rather than simply maximising capacity on a summer waterfront.
After the Brooklyn leg concluded, the night continued at The Edge‘s Marquee Skydeck, perched 1,000 feet above midtown. The juxtaposition was deliberate and well-judged: the open waterfront, vast and industrial, giving way to a glass-edged platform that puts Manhattan’s grid beneath your feet. Two very different ideas of New York, encountered in a single night.
Cloonee played an extended solo set at the Skydeck, pushing the party into the early hours. The sequencing of a long waterfront gathering followed by an elevated close-out is the sort of structural thinking that separates a label showcase from a mere club night. It treats the city itself as a venue, which, in the hands of a producer who clearly has a visual sense to match his ear for a record, produced something more than a ticketed event.
Music That Carried the Night
Keeping the energy in the final stretch were two tracks with obvious crowd logic behind them. ‘Free Your Mind’, Cloonee’s hit single, did the work it was presumably always designed to do in a live setting. His collaboration with Prospa, ‘Good Girl’, arrived alongside it, and together the two tracks held the momentum through the morning hours. These are records built for exactly this kind of space: not for the confined fug of a basement room, but for altitude and open air, where the bass can actually travel.
All of which sets up what comes next with a certain amount of pressure attached. Cloonee’s debut solo album, Are You Still You?, is due in early October. A label showcase on this scale, visually ambitious and logistically complex, is not the usual warm-up act for a record release. It suggests a confidence in the material that is either entirely justified or about to be tested. The album’s arrival will answer the question the event raised: whether the spectacle was in service of the music, or the other way around.
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