Prospa & Cloonee's 'Free Your Mind': Tech House Hits UK No. 6

How a Demo Rescued From a Power Cut Became a UK Top 10 House Record

When the electricity cut out mid-session, Cloonee ended up on SoundCloud hunting through files he'd forgotten existed. One of them, a rough demo from around 2020, stopped him cold. He played it to Prospa. They rebuilt the drums so it wouldn't feel dated, Prospa layered in chords and an extra rhythm bed, and the result — "Free Your Mind," released March 27 on CircoLoco Records — became the standout track of their debut album and one of the defining house singles of 2026. It peaked at number six on the UK Singles Chart, number one on the UK Dance Chart, number one on US Dance Airplay, and went Gold in both the UK and Australia. By November, it's still trending on the Official Charts — an unusual lifespan for any dance record, let alone one on an independent underground label.

CircoLoco Makes Its Long-Play Move

The bigger context is what this release means for CircoLoco Records. The Ibiza institution — grown from the legendary Monday nights at DC10, associated with figures like Ricardo Villalobos and DJ Tennis — had been releasing EPs and singles since it formalised as a label. But Free Your Mind marks a first: the label's debut full-length album. That matters. It signals that CircoLoco is building something with longer reach than a club night, treating its imprint as a serious outlet for sustained artistic statements rather than dancefloor-only drops.

Prospa — Leeds-based duo Guiorgi Smith and Harvey Blumler — were the logical choice to carry that moment. By the time the album landed on June 5, they had two Beatport number ones to their name ("Love Songs" and "Don't Stop" in 2025, the latter holding its position for weeks), ranked as Beatport's fifth best-selling tech house act of the year, and had run a tight global touring schedule through Coachella, Ibiza, and EDC. The momentum was already there; this was the record that converted it into something permanent.

What the Song Actually Does

At 128 BPM, "Free Your Mind" sits at the more patient end of the tech house tempo range — room to breathe, room to build. The track samples "Oh, How I Love You" by singer-songwriter Sybil, lifting a vocal hook that hits the chorus with the line "just free your mind, my love is what you'll find." The production credits list both Prospa and Cloonee, plus songwriting contributions from Sam Mack and Victor Simonelli, the latter a New York house figure with a discography stretching back to the early 90s. That lineage isn't incidental — the track has a structural confidence that nods toward classic vocal house without mimicking it.

The arrangement earns its length. Early bars are stripped back and low-key, with four-on-the-floor kicks, a buoyant bassline, and an organ riff that settles before the first break. The second verse shifts: the keys turn darker, the groove tightens, and a deeper vocal narration takes over before the main hook returns harder. Live, it functions both as an opening tool — accessible enough to warm a room — and as a peak-time anchor when the arrangement is fully open. Cloonee played an early version at The Warehouse Project in a back-to-back with Prospa months before the official release, which explains part of the track's slow-build chart trajectory: it was road-tested and word-of-mouth before it was available to buy.

The Autumn Resurgence

It's worth pausing on the fact that the track is still moving in November. Dance records typically burn fast: a Beatport chart run, six weeks of rotation, then nothing. "Free Your Mind" followed a different arc. It debuted slowly, broke into the UK top ten in late July, and has stayed within the streaming and chart ecosystem months later. Some of that is TikTok — the song's chorus is well-structured for short-form video — but that explanation only goes so far. The track works because it makes emotional sense in multiple contexts: festival fields in June, autumn club sets, closing moments at after-hours events. The vocal doesn't belong to a specific season.

The chart positions across Europe tell a consistent story. It reached the top 10 in Ireland, the Netherlands (both chart formats), and charted strongly on Beatport alongside Germany's dance chart, with entries across Switzerland, Belgium, and Sweden. The Global Dance Radio chart saw it at number one for multiple weeks. That kind of geographic spread is rare for music that isn't pop-formatted radio material — it suggests the track found actual traction in club programming across different scenes, not just a TikTok spike followed by a fall-off.

Tech House and the Mainstream Conversation

What "Free Your Mind" represents at a genre level is worth considering beyond the chart positions. Tech house has always existed in a complicated relationship with mainstream visibility — big enough to sell out festivals, too rhythmically specific to sit comfortably on pop radio. This track navigated that gap, landing on Radio 1 playlists, Capital Dance rotation, and the official UK singles chart while retaining a sound that holds up in a club at 1 AM. The fact that it was written by a Leeds-based duo on an Ibiza-originated label and cleared a Sybil sample on its way to number one is a decent summary of where the genre finds itself in 2026: genuinely global, structurally rooted in house's past, and increasingly comfortable occupying space it wasn't supposed to reach.

The debut album around it, also titled Free Your Mind, extends the proposition across a full project. With a CircoLoco imprint that is now, quietly, in the album business, the expectation is that more sustained releases follow — from Prospa and potentially others. That is a different kind of ambition from a label that built its reputation one Monday night at a time.