HAAI - Digitise

An Australian transplanted to London (and to Daniel Miller's Mute), Teneil Laetitia Throssell is one of the most interesting voices — or rather, hands — on today's EDM scene. Shamefully, Haai, her moniker as DJ and producer, has never before appeared on our pages. It should therefore be noted that before tackling this "Digitise", it would be wise to also get acquainted with 2022's "Baby, We Are Ascending" and last year's "Humanise". These are in fact three pieces of what we might call a narrative arc, given the way the music transforms according to the concepts it embraces. On her debut, Haai proved herself a worthy disciple of both Aphex Twin and Daniel Lopatin, pairing club beats with the attitude of an explorer of sound and its future possibilities. On the second, she instead enlisted the help of Jon Hopkins and vocalists like Obi Franky to bring her futurist techno back down to earth and to people.

The lyrical cues that stand out over the beats of "Digitise", voiced by Echonomist, Pat Alvarez and Kaiden Ford, present us with a third album wrestling with technology's increasingly pervasive presence in our daily lives, while at the same time embracing that very technology to stage a transcendental rave built on ultra-defined sounds and surgical beats. If the album's opening tracks, "Re-humanize" and "Ignition", are highly scenic, narrative pieces in which the words flow over futuristic IDM backdrops, "Digitise" is a techno bomb that blows the rave wide open, with no turning back. Every track that follows is programmed to up the ante in terms of beats and new sci-fi inventions (the digital music-box chimes of "Humanise Radio", the robotic gait of the breakbeats in "Technology").

The tireless four-on-the-floor kick driving the second half of the album keeps galloping on "Thank U", while on "I Wanna Feel Like Someone" it proceeds more stealthily, trying to dodge the laser synths it meets along the way. Besides the whole string of names mentioned above, one also thinks of Drexciya, FSOL and even Underworld, though none of these references feels merely derivative: the lessons of the masters are well absorbed, but also duly brought up to date. After such an exciting third album, one that raises the bar on Haai's output well beyond the rosiest expectations, there's reason to expect even more from this ever-evolving artist. The cover art is terrible, though it does make sense once you take a look at the effective office-themed visuals devised for streaming platforms.

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15/10/2026