ANYWHERE HERE IS PERFECT

Sam Gellaitry has spent most of his life thinking about what his debut should sound like. “I’ve been making this album for pretty much 28 years,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. It’s not far from the truth: Since uploading his first tracks as a teenager from Stirling, the Scottish producer, singer, and songwriter has experimented across future beats, house, funk, and pop—a jazz record was even considered at one point—following his creative impulses wherever (and whenever) they called. “I guess that’s why it kind of took this long, because I was jumping around,” he admits. “I have that kind of creative scatterbrain. This is the first time I’ve been very thematic and calculated about the sonics. My other projects have not stuck to one genre. The challenge of this album was to stick to one.” *ANYWHERE HERE IS PERFECT* feels like Gellaitry expanded the bright, prismatic world of his 2021 hit “Assumptions” (which, serendipitously, resurfaced in a viral moment just months before the project announcement) into an album. It pairs funky dance-floor grooves with sparkling synth-pop and runs them through a retro filter. Songs like “START UP A RUMOUR” and “CURIOUS” beam with the French-house sheen of Daft Punk, while “LOVE ON ME” recalls George Michael in its earnest, exuberant sparkle. Elsewhere, swirling synths, noodly guitar riffs, and digitized vocal harmonies add playful hues and textures. And yes, there are even a few beat switch-ups to scratch that scatterbrain itch. The album is as much a personal evolution as it is creative. Across 12 songs, Gellaitry navigates the highs and lows of love with the kind of directness that makes every feeling hit harder. “LIGHTNING,” with its walloping drums and marching-band fervor, captures the intense rush of infatuation when meeting someone new, while “DANGER!” reignites the spark of an old flame. Pushing through relationship paranoia (“ON&ON”), quiet reckoning (“CLOUDS”), and the jagged wounds of past pain (“SCAR / A NEW VOID”), he finds euphoric catharsis in “YOU MIGHT FIND THE ONE.” Gellaitry’s rainbow palette is informed in part by his synesthesia, but he also sees it as a reflection of his Scottish roots, nodding to the country’s cultural exports like happy hardcore and Calvin Harris. “We’ve got so much beautiful nature, but if you’re in a city, like Glasgow, it is a bit gray,” he says. “I feel like a lot of the sounds that come from there are basically painting over the gray. Maybe we’re filling that void that we’re not getting enough sunlight.”