Andy Stott - Late Loop LP

The skills necessary for crafting music that hits on a stack of speakers and those required to arrange "proper songs" are markedly different - and very rarely shared. In Stott's case, he's at least got prior form. Since 2012's 'Luxury Problems', he's made his former piano teacher Alison Skidmore's vocals one of the most recognisable elements of his sound. You couldn't call it pop music, exactly, but there were more than faint traces of shoegaze, R&B and sophistipop as he sculpted tracks that dramatically redrew the blueprints inked by Seefeel, This Mortal Coil and Prefab Sprout. Even when the vocals stood out, they were usually used as texture: memory-triggering colours that buffed out his rhythms, grimey stabs and Ron Hardy-inspired basslines. And that's why 'Late Loop' smacks like a boot to the jaw; on paper, it looks familiar enough with Skidmore appearing once again, this time alongside Stott's Modern Love label-mate Elaine Howley, but sonically it's a revelation, a suite of properly living, breathing songs that weave Stott's screwed production into the voices, not the other way around.

"I can still feel love," Skidmore mutters on the opener 'Cold Welcome'. We know her voice well at this stage, but she sounds remarkably different here. She speaks informally, lapsing into song seemingly by accident as if lost in her own thoughts. And Stott sounds just as distinct, reshaping his pulverised "knackered house" pops and thuds away from the glare of strobe lights by letting the electronic sounds really respire for the first time. His lightbulb moment this time around occurred when he began recording everything through a microphone, instead of piping his beat-up synths and drum machines straight into the desk. Imbuing his sounds with a natural room tone allowed him to cut back on the dreamy reverb that had powered his earlier material and gives 'Late Loop' its distinct character. We're so used to hearing these elements dubbed in a certain way, in fact, that giving them a touch of air puffs the songs off the timeline, aligning them with '80s and '90s productions made just before hard disk production was democratised. The music isn't nostalgic, but Stott also steadfastly avoids any contemporary pop signifiers, retaining his foundational inspirations (AFX, Prince, MBV) and arriving on gratifyingly verdant terrain. In many ways, it's something he's been teasing since 2012: the perfect DIY pop record that's long marinated in the vapors beneath the chugging subs and hashed amens.

Stott's also found an ideal collaborator in Howley, who melts into Stott's brittle production for the first time on 'Something in mind'. "Isn't this how diamonds are made?" she asks, drifting from register to register, sometimes sounding like Alison Statton and alternately shaping her voice into Enya-like fogged-out chorals. Howley also makes an appearance on 'The hardest thing', half-whispering over fragile drones that Stott squeezes from an old pump organ he rescued from the attic. And she carries 'Songbird', the album's melancholy romantic apex, meeting Stott's faded Detroit synth strings and damaged keys with a hook that's so casually seductive you'd think it was cribbed from the vault at Paisley Park. Elsewhere, Skidmore effortlessly takes the lead, restraining her calls on the brilliant '2024-2', the track that spotlights Stott's use of an old Lexicon delay unit to lend his drums their peculiar buzz. And Stott fittingly lets Skidmore handle the album's title track, a closer that hammers home the prevailing themes. "You mean everything to me," she stutters, her words piped through the Lexicon until they sound like fading memories. Stott replies with just skeletal accompaniments: faint pads and busted drum machine loops that seize up into a frangible backbone. 'Cause it's the songs that are the focal point throughout.

Sure, Stott's refined his skills and overhauled his methodology, but that's in service of the songs themselves. The collaged recollections of heartbreak, distance and love's perpetual echo are for the first time placed front and centre and Stott has never sounded more candid. His transition from club producer to art-pop auteur is complete.