This record keeps you guessing. It starts off with “Hybrid Romance”, an ambient piece that’s very pretty but has swooping glassy synths that crack and fracture and could easily be about to break into some super jagged Berlin deconstructed club music at any minute.
But less than two minutes later and we’re into “Chlorine”, a song in the modern country-inflected pop style which wouldn’t sound out of place on most daytime radio channels, and you could easily imagine the Californian Ded Hyatt performing as a support act for Taylor Swift or Harry Styles.
The thing is, though, “Chlorine” has lots of wibbly AutoTune and peculiar synth sounds of its own, and for all it seems super-mainstream it’s really not a big jump from the track before. And it’s not that big a jump, either, when the next track “Bodies” goes into some severely narcotic and discordant pitch-shifting of vocals over a twanging bass: it’s really, really weird, but at the same time you could just about imagine it in a James Blake or Frank Ocean record, and these are hardly niche artists.
On it goes, slipping, sliding and melting between frankly deranged sonic manipulation and signifiers so mainstream you start wondering if the vocals take more influence from a Justin Bieber tradition or from 70s country-pop. But if you start to think about lines of influence, that way madness lies: you’ll hear Japan and Kate Bush speaking to the Swedish pop powerhouses that drive modern K-Pop, you’ll hear Don Henley in dialogue with Afrobeats, you’ll hear The Aphex Twin singing lullabies to Future, and... on it goes.
But it isn’t – quite – a complete hodge-podge. Somehow it makes sense as it goes along, the elements flow naturally together, and it’s often downright gorgeous. But then two minutes later you’ll find yourself through another wormhole and wondering how you got there. This is one of the hardest records ever to rate: I’m hedging my bets here, because even after a lot of listens it still leaves me deeply confused and disoriented and doesn't feel like it's settled down into being a clear thing of its own – but I’m leaving the outside chance that in six months I'll think it a classic for the ages. Either way, there’s certainly no faulting its mind-mangling ambition, its ability to depict a world in flux, nor the stunning craft that has gone into it.
Listen to "Chlorine"
