SBTRKT & Toro y Moi – Days Go By

Album: THE RAT ROAD

Label : Save Yourself
© 2023 Save Yourself under exclusive license to AWAL Recordings Ltd

Seven years after their last album, the acclaimed Wonder Where We Land in 2016, SBTRKT returns without their famous mask. The British musician, whose father is Scottish and mother Indian, chose to fully embrace his identity and “reclaim his voice”, which was apparently muffled by camouflage.

After launching into orbit as a new sensation in British electronic music, SBTRKT took refuge in the studio, compulsively lining up compositions. This album thus has 22 tracks – knowing that he sent 400 tracks to his label – and takes the form of a mixtape with many interludes and short pieces of less than two minutes.

And clearly, Aaron Jerome decided to make fun of formats, an intention displayed from the single L.F.O.. Going from one style to another in full song, assuming UFOs like DON’T LET or YOU BROKE MY HEART BUT IMMA FIX IT, SBTRKT sits somewhere between Kanye West and Aphex Twin, and makes the most of yet another solid guest list.

We find there the essential Sampha, the Californian Toro Y Moi, who brings a psychic side to an already very chill record, the trans activist Kai-Isaiah Jamal for a slam, but above all the London singer Leilah, a real revelation of this record. , which can be found on several titles, including the jazzy/New Age FORWARD or the R&B of the DRIFT space, one of the peaks of an album not always accessible but on which SBTRKT seems completely liberated.

© Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz