3 out of 5

Label: WéMè Records

Produced by: ?

RTR is back to absolutely slay us with more BPM IDM killers, tickling the synth ivories in the spirit of the squiggliest Aphex Twin / Squarepusher moments. But: by purposefully gathering up all of the most extreme tendencies of their style, XOR crosses some kind of threshold, starting out as an amazing tour de force EP, and then becoming rather exhausting past the midpoint. Interestingly, this sort of comes bundled with a slight shift in the approach as well: RTR has been massaging their influences more and more into their own brew, ditching the straight callbacks to classic Rephlex and confidently crafting tracks that still sound straight out of that era, but stand on their own – recent RTR releases could’ve been side-by-side on the shelf with Windowlicker, and that evolution achieves something like full form on XOR’s first half. But then around when we hit the title track, firstly, the beats go even harder – leaning into drill aggressiveness – and the all-to-clear callbacks return as well, making the album’s latter tracks, frankly, less interesting, and sort of going back to where the RTR journey started – lots of bravado that doesn’t necessarily listen great as sequential songs. Sequencing has been the demon on the shoulder of almost every RTR album, so you could say it’s expected here, though the clear juxtaposition of Best Of work and comparatively derivative stuff (still impressive! just more clearly in-the-style-of [insert name here]) plus the decision to go hard on every track ends up making this drop off quite drastically after a certain point.

But: I kept going back around to piece it together, and the opening half remains absolutely solid, with RTR finding range even within the amped up nature of the set, going from all-out blitzes (how they habitually open their recordings…) to tracks with more standardized beats, and getting a lot of range out of the production, introducing some more melodic elements inbetween the freakout moments. Surely worth owning as part of your RTR collection, but we’re still working towards that perfect release.