As we reported yesterday, Laurel Halo is set to release her debut full-length through London’s Hyperdub label, a great hook up for both parties concerned. Halo is making some of the most interesting electronic music around at the moment, with a multi-genre, sui generis sound that explores everything from vocal electro-pop to ambient, sunken techno to rapid-fire footwork beats.
The album, Quarantine, is set for release on 28th May. Having heard it, we’re confident in saying it’s one of the most unique and interesting albums of the year so far – closer in sound to Halo’s vocal-driven first EP King Felix than her more recent releases, it’s an album composed of songs, but songs with an astonishing amount of physical presence and textural detail. The album’s artwork, which you can see below, is a bright, splattery thing in keeping with the technicolour, science-leaning visual sensibilities of her earlier EPs.
"Like Halo’s previous releases, Quarantine slams ambient suspension and disorienting detail up against each other," say Hyperdub. "The twelve songs here operate as complex vacuums, airborne harmony and movement met with incidental noise and sub bass pressure, sample details and synth lines as trails across a mutilated sonic topography… Sensual melodies are bent to the point of nausea, inducing the torque of a psychedelic pop that simultaneously recalls elevation and trauma.  This is a kind of music you might not have heard before, and in 2012 that in itself is rare."
For more on Laurel Halo, click here to read our long interview with her from around the time of her Hour Logic EP last year.
Quarantine‘s tracklist runs as follows:
‘Airsick’
‘Years’
‘Thaw’
‘Joy’
‘MK Ultra’
‘Wow’
‘Carcass’
‘Holoday’
‘Tumor’
‘Morcom’
‘Nerve’
‘Light + Space’
Photo by Tim Saccenti
