New Energy
Kieran Hebden’s restlessly inventive, genre-splicing music is often as unpredictable as it is hypnotic. That holds firmly on his ninth album as Four Tet, where harp-mottled openers “Alap” and “Two Thousand and Seventeen” suggest the supple, folk-inflected electronic of 2003’s *Rounds* but soon give way to singular experiments in ambient techno (“LA Trance”), head-nodding deep house (“SW9 9SL”), and abstract neoclassical (“10 Midi”). As ever, Hebden builds his music with precision, warmth, and a rare gift for consuming melodies.
Kieran Hebden’s pursuit of new sounds has found him digging into his own catalog. New Energy is a wide-ranging album that connects the warmth of his early work to his latest club experiments.
Since the late 2000s, Kieren Hebden's work as Four Tet (plus side ventures like Percussions and KH) has explored club culture more thoroughly than his earlier releases, nodding to pirate radio and U.K. garage with albums like Beautiful Rewind and white-label collaborations with producers such as Burial and Terror Danjah.
New Energy is a seamless body of work that evinces Kieran Hebden's masterful and dextrous use of percussion and harmonic textures, bridging...
New Energy requires less work from its listeners than any other Four Tet album.