Alessio Collina has spent years building Trend Records into a home for serious house music, releasing records by Terry Farley, Paul Johnson, Ricky Montanari, and Paul Cut. On Shades of Me E.P., out September 24, 2026 via Trend Records Limited, he turns that same curatorial instinct on himself — and the result is one of his most personal statements to date.
Catalogued as TRLTD007, the release is a four-track vinyl-only EP pressed to just 200 copies, mastered by Spectrum Studio in Bologna and distributed through Basic Frame Distribution. The format is deliberate. Vinyl-only releases at this scale carry a collector-minded weight that shapes how a record is heard, bought, and played, and Collina has clearly made peace with that trade-off. The limited run is not a marketing gimmick — it is a position.
The title does a lot of work. Rather than presenting a single, unified sound, Collina uses the four tracks to map out different corners of his musical identity: garage-leaning house, deep and tribal pressure, techier club movement, and darker Chicago-rooted house. Each track occupies its own space on the record while remaining connected by a shared commitment to rhythm, bass, and dancefloor function. It is a structure that rewards the listener who plays the whole thing through.
The A-side opens with “Bloom in the Garage,” and it sets the tone immediately. Built around a fat bassline, dirty drums, garage-influenced stabs, and the unmistakable swing of an MPC1000, the track wears its hardware-driven sensibilities openly. There is grit here, and funk, and a rough-edged human quality that keeps it from sounding polished into irrelevance. It is direct enough to work as an opening DJ tool but textured enough to avoid feeling disposable once the moment has passed.
“Back to the Real” follows and pulls the energy inward. Described as a deep and tribal cut with a sensual quality to its rhythm, the track is built for warm-up hours and intimate afterhours rooms where subtlety carries more weight than force. It leaves space for the room to breathe rather than pushing it forward too early. Together, the two A-side tracks demonstrate Collina thinking like a DJ as much as a producer — one track with garage bite, the other leaning into slower hypnosis, giving the record options without fracturing its identity.
The B-side opens with “Spring Equinox,” which shifts gears into the EP’s most immediate dancefloor moment. A rolling, techy rhythm drives the track forward, anchored by a seriously weighty bassline, dreamy melodic touches, and a constantly evolving stab. There is plenty of movement without unnecessary complication — the kind of track that adds pressure to a floor without demanding attention for its own sake.
Closing the record, “The Party” moves into darker territory. Chicago house is clearly in the DNA, but Collina approaches those references from an alternative angle rather than recreating the template directly. It is a fitting way to end a record built around variation within a defined framework — the darkest corner of the EP, arrived at naturally rather than forced.
Collina also records and releases under the alias HILL, with credits on labels including Skylax, Wilson, and Bosconi, and his DJ work has taken him across Italy and internationally. That broader context matters when listening to Shades of Me. This is not a debut artist finding their footing. It is a producer with a clear sense of where he has been, using a short-run vinyl release to draw a line around the different strains of house that have shaped him — and leaving the record to speak for itself at 200 copies.
Sources: Magnetic Magazine, When We Dip
