5 hours ago
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From Sheffield, via Leeds
Recommended if you like Mark Fell, Jlin, Beatrice Dillon
Up next Live set at No Bounds festival in October
It’s thrilling and satisfying when an artist’s debut album is so fully realised: as if they have their own hyperlocal dialect, and are saying something genuinely new with it. So it is with NZO, a mysterious Sheffield-based electronic artist whose album Come Alive is a defibrillating jolt of vitality. You can find affinities with other artists and styles here, for sure: the bookish but playful minimalism of another Sheffield musician, Mark Fell; Objekt’s trickster vision for bass music and techno; the white-tiled cleanliness of some of Sophie’s work; Jlin’s paradoxically static funk. But the way it’s all pulled together is totally NZO’s, making for music that’s so light on its feet despite its incredible complexity.
After a brief intro piece, main opener Rolling Around has all the hallmarks of dubstep but it’s as if a slight glitch is holding it back from a deep skanking rhythm. The little ripples of conga on AXMM, or the synthetic brass fanfares of Something’s Changed, are sounds you often hear in Chicago footwork music – probably deliberate homages, yet the actual productions are totally different, the former fidgeting, the latter bumping.
NZO: Come Alive – stream Spotify
Her use of vocals is excellent, too, from the very quotable house-style command “won’t stop dancing til the DJ drops” on CFML, to faraway dream-pop singing on Something’s Changed. There’s more on half-stepping closer Looking For “: the kind of poignant snatch of pop that Burial reaches for, but rather than being cloaked in static, this lost transmission comes through with devastating clarity. This album is cute yet serious, danceable yet cerebral – very few people are operating at this level in British electronic music anywhere, much less with their debut.
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The week’s best new tracks – playlist Spotify
