New Four Tet album very soon

[Vodkafone]

First track from it has been released, called Loved

Quite a 90s feel to it, the beauty and simplicity of it really works for me. If this is representative of the album, I'm very happy.

[The Mollusk]

His output has been really hit and miss for me after Everything Ecstatic but I like this song a lot. Lovely thing to hear lying in bed on a Sunday morning.

[Pauline Walnuts]

I did feel the olds when I saw that 20 year anniversary of Rounds or whatever it was.


And it was, checks notes, 10 years ago.

Eh, oh wait it was the 10th year anniversary.

[The Mollusk]

Hebbo also dropped this tune late last year which is in a similar vein of downtempo beat and lovely waves of ambient. I was fully expecting to love this when I saw the track duration but it feels like him trying to recreate Unspoken (one of my absolute fave songs ever) in a relatively cheap way - repeating a phrase and cranking up the distortion slowly until it breaks off the boil and melts back down. It's mostly nice enough but at its peak the distorted bit became a tad irritating which is exactly what you don't want with this sort of song!

In any case it does still indicate the direction he appears to be going for his next release so I remain optimistic.

[Vodkafone]

The album (Three) is out now. I really like it, it's beautiful. It's an album where he hasn't tried to do anything exceptional or new or groundbreaking, and some people won't like it for that. It has a lot of space, which is one of the qualities that endears it to me. Whereas some of his (great) work is like a rushing stream where it's hard to keep track of everything that's going on, this is more like a wide, slow river but with enough swirls and ripples to keep it interesting. There is of course a risk that this then becomes wallpaper music, and there is one track, So Blue, that is as mediocre as its title. But the rest is really good - Daydream Repeat is a jacking little banger; pitched up a bit it would be a floor filler. My favourite is Storm Crystals, which has all the right spaces in all the right places.

[The Mollusk]

It's his best album since Everything Ecstatic. I'm not saying it reaches the same highs or does any of the same things EE does (and I don't think it does) but it's still really lovely and the sort of thing I've been hoping he would return to for a long time.