Polymer

It’s a relief to state that their new album Polymer is very much Plaid’s best album this decade, and at least their best since 2008’s Heaven’s Door.

Polymer is a wonderfully elusive, unpredictable album that constantly surprises. It's undoubtedly a Plaid record with knotty rhythmic detours and tricky beats that will delight fans both old and new. However, by successfully tying the tracks to culturally relevant, apposite themes, it's also one of their most strikingly accomplished albums to date.

The minimal tracks here stretch (and sometimes tangle) like long chains of extruded material, pulsing along into the future. [Jun 2019, p.68]

It's rhythmic patterns and twisting beats are surprising throughout, making the record as unpredictable a voyage as the times we live in. [Jul 2019, p.33]

Polymer is their darkest record to date. It still sounds undeniably Plaid, but tracks like "Meds Fade" and "Recall," which sounds like barrage of error messages knocking on your front door, will have you reaching for the light switch. Now they can add ominous to their established repertoire of complex and simple.

Polymer is one of Plaid's most successful hybrids of organic and artificial sounds, matching its ambitious themes and concepts with enlightening music.

Theirs is a cerebral electronica, characterised by slippery time signatures, off-kilter drum patterns and baroque flourishes. Their 10th album, Polymer, distills all these traits. [Summer 2019, p.115]

Plaid’s contemporaries from the early ’90s are in very different places now, with Aphex Twin incorporating styles footwork in his new releases and Autechre progressing further and further into uncharted terrain. This album, however, is from a duo mostly content to amble down memory lane.