4 out of 5

Label: SVBKVLT

Produced by: Evan Majumdar-Swift

As soon as he dropped onto the IDM radar as a breakbeat glitch master with his initial CPU releases, 96 Back (Evan Majumdar-Swift) has been toying with his abilities and our expectations. For some creatives, this is a risky proposition, as it leads to a kind of instability with their material – never knowing what you’re going to get, and possibly relegating some entire releases to skippable efforts. 96 Back has maintained an emotional throughline in his discography, though, which has firstly helped to link even disparate seeming entries, but also has rather guaranteed that those entries are worth exploring. This “throughline” is largely intangible, of course, but it’s something that I’d say informs his compositional approach: a willingness to try something completely new, as long as it feels true to him at the time.

tender, exit is another stab at this – a goal of stripping down production; of applying more of a narrative to the music – but it is also one of the first 96 Back evolutions to kind of sound like a synthesis of what came before, even while being something new. I’d propose it as a first step into the artist’s second phase: a maturing of identity on top of already matured technical skills.

Purportedly outlining a move from Manchester to London and framed as the history of a relationship, the album covers a fair amount of aural territory: from the acid IDM of early material, to the ambient experimentation of The Neon Pack, and the woozy vocals fronted grooves of Love Letters. The emotive bit I’m describing around above is heard through Majumdar-Swift’s controlled impulses: production equally blends a loose, organic vibe with a very tight and purposeful flow, reflected in the artist’s clear adoration for progenitors a la Aphex, but also those same masters’ ability to take the core of a sound and make it their own. On an album like tender, in which we get to hear several modes under the same roof, that approach is especially apparent, and is also what allows a true 96 Back “sound” to emerge, somewhere between the harsh beats of Rubber Knife and the noisy slink of closer Come Round: a kind of traditional song structure that mimics a live sound with digital proxies, pushing verse-chorus-verse into surprising directions with divergences to timing and tone that don’t totally step away from a recognizable melody.

That said, there’s a bit of cart-before-horse here: even without knowing there’s intended to be a narrative, tender, exit feels like it’s telling two stories, and not necessarily chronologically: there’s an angry, antsy story, and one that’s more reflective, and wistful; the flip-flop between these stories is the least organic part of things, as it feels like the moods were split up just to offer some variation, instead of sequencing in a way that daisy chains the listener from one track to the next. It’s almost like a compilation in that sense.

Sometimes, there’s great synergy, like the way Bxtter’s business mimics traffic sounds, and then you get a burly track called DUI2 right after, but on the whole, it’s one of the least flowing of 96’s albums, even if each individual track is awesome. How this maps to a more stripped back production I dunno, ’cause it sounds as dense as ever.

Over the course of six years, Evan Majumdar-Swift has traveled a lifetime’s worth of electro styles. tender, exit is clearly a step forward into an even more defined phase, which makes the potential next lifetime even more exciting to experience.