FOUR TET - Everything Ecstatic

Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet is back. He returns with a work that departs from his usual standards: much more rhythmic, less brazenly emotional than his previous records. But that's not all. This is an album deeply influenced by certain sounds our man loves unconditionally; have you heard his "Late Night Tales" compilation? Well, give it a listen and you'll understand a lot about this new work. What I want to make clear straight away is that, once again, the quality of what's on offer is beyond question: plenty of people are ready to cry foul play, but I'll take the presumptuous liberty of saying they're mistaken, and badly so. It was time for a change, time to leave behind a path that had been successfully trodden, yes, but already familiar, already conquered.

After branding a genre, indietronica, with works that hardly respect the genre's clichés, veering instead onto avant, ambient and exquisitely pop tracks, the man looked around, sniffed out something different, felt a different kind of inspiration. A glance back at a glorious past with Fridge and their percussive, post-everything rides, and here's "A Joy": an obsessive, ultra-deep bassline, lopsided and thundering drums. Practically danceable.

Kieran's heart, though, never stops beating, and so a melody arrives in fade in, a synth that recalls the sinuous harmonies of tracks like "Unspoken", one of the wonders found on his masterpiece, "Rounds". The single "Smile Around The Face" is another surprise, with two overlapping linear drum patterns and a driving melody that, if it were a voice, would be a majestic and sparkling Aretha Franklin, the soul spirit of a track deeply dreamy in mood, expressed through an electronic vocabulary. Brilliant.

The songs flow by, and once again it's Fridge that keeps coming to mind time and again: the drum parts are treated in the same way, lending a humanity that brings warmth and color to everything, and providing the perfect foundation to support certain black elements that surface here and there (certain horns on "Sun Drums And Soil"). Echoes of the past also emerge on "And the Patterns", where over a midtempo base the usual melodic instincts of this not-so-misunderstood genius Kieran Hebden peek through — without doubt one of the key figures of the electronic scene: someone who chews through a ton of music and digests it in a truly singular way, before serving it back to us blended, degenerated. A typical example is "Turtle Turtle Up", which opens with an acid synth-bass and continues with the classic Fourtet-esque bell tones, before gradually morphing into a kraut-rock ride, in the style of the latest Manitoba record under the name Caribou, which filters kraut material in a more explicitly bluesy way. And what about the glitch-house drift of "Sleep, Eatfood, Have Visions"?

In short, you'll have gathered that this album doesn't lack for bombs either. Perhaps in the past Four Tet's design was more homogeneous and focused, but never has he seemed so eager to turn the page as in this case. Without forgetting his history, of course.

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30/04/2026