New Energy

Elaborating on the foundations that have propelled Four Tet through his 20-year career, Hebden allows the sonic palettes from records Pause and Rounds to bleed into textures born from transfigured field recordings and sonic artefacts that epitomize the producer's discography while refining his sonic identity.

New Energy finally feels like an album that is truly unique, and characteristic of Hebden’s style. An artist comfortable with his tools.

Hebden's skill is to weave such ethnographic curiosities into the fabric of his own luminous electronica without it feeling like a dry curatorial exercise. [Dec 2017, p.27]

Like all of Four Tet’s work, New Energy can be viewed as an addition to this unlikely canon, whose practitioners share a desire to remove a listener from their surroundings and bring them someplace higher, no matter the means.

To say New Energy is a consolidation rather than a progression may seem damning with faint praise, but its palate is so substantial and nourishing that such slight ambition is peripheral. If you’re served a basic carbonara by a Michelin-star pasta chef it’s still a damn fine carbonara.

New Energy is one of the most accessible, listener-friendly releases in the Four Tet catalog, but it still maintains the creativity and unpredictability that have always made his work stand out.

With Four Tet’s ninth album, New Energy, Hebden does something unexpected: He revisits previous sounds. There’s the low-key warmth of 2003’s Rounds, the free jazz at the heart of 2005’s Everything Ecstatic, the friendly thump of 2012’s Pink, the sprawl of 2015’s Morning/Evening. Downtempo nodders, beatless passages that flow into big bangers—he synthesizes all this into his most accessible listen since There is Love in You.

Though far from perfect, New Energy is one of Hebden's most intimate and personal albums, with all the idiosyncrasies that come with that.