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Apr 14, 2026 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Jules Slutsky

Muscle Memory is the project of New York-based producer and DJ duo Steven Reker and Michael Tapper. Over the past few years, Reker and Tapper, both veterans of New York’s indie scene, have pivoted from their formative years in indie rock towards dance music. After DJing together in Brooklyn clubs, they began collaborating on their own music as Muscle Memory, indulging their crate-digging habits with tracks that stretch across the breadth of dance music history, touching on house, Italo disco, techno, and post punk along the way. The pair debuted with a handful of singles in 2024, “Taste of a Kiss” and “Body of Light,” before following last year with the tracks “Get Lost” and “Adrenaline.” Today, they’re back with another new track, “Conditions of Love,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Conditions of Love” is alluring and compulsively danceable, pulling the listener in from its early moments with a lean, surging bass groove and breathy vocalizations. As the drum machine beat enters, Reker and Tapper fill the track with glittering synths and off-kilter space-faring effects, highlighting the tiny production details but allowing them flit, flicker, and eventually layer together to create a woozy miasma of tones and textures. Muscle Memory packs the track with playful turns, but the results wash over the listener all at once like an enveloping wave, with each starburst of melody swirling into the dreamy vocal intonations and insistent club rhythms. As the pair describes, the track is tailor-made “for dancing through the sadness, holding close the slipping away, or sweating on a dear stranger.”

The duo say of the track, “One of the first songs we wrote together, ‘Conditions Of Love’ started as a somewhat dubby post-punk experiment, pairing strange Juno 60 synth sounds and delay-laden drum machine beats with ruminations on a decaying relationship in a dying world. We played it live in this form for a couple years, and it was a staple of our live set even though we hadn’t released it. When we began thinking about making club-oriented remixes of our own songs, Conditions was the first one we attempted, completely rethinking it, with a vastly different tempo, bassline, drum beat, everything except the vocals, which we cut up and melded into the new track. We aimed to make it something we would play in our DJ sets, adjusting the tempo for the dancefloor and trying for a groove-forward beat and bassline, while retaining some of the post-punk influence of artists like Gina X, A Certain Ratio, and Orange Juice.

After working on it for a few days, we were kind of like, ok that was an interesting exercise, and abandoned the idea to focus on a few other songs, which we ended up putting out as 12” singles in 2024 and 2025. It wasn’t until over a year later that we went back and listened to what we had come up with during that initial experimentation, and when we listened back, we both were like, damn, this actually should be the definitive version of the song. And so it is.”

Check out the song below, out everywhere on April 17th.