Late Loop

Andy Stott is often pegged as a studio auteur—revered for his identifiably distressed and damaged approach, kicking up clouds of noise, rust, and dust through intensive analog processing—but rarely is he hailed as a songwriter. Which is unlucky, because through his ongoing alchemical collaboration with vocalist Alison Skidmore, the ex-auto refinisher from the outskirts of Manchester has recorded some of the most emotionally wrecked songs that anyone (me) has ever played on repeat through broken earbuds in the depths of a SAD-lamp winter. Now he’s finally recorded a few more. On Late Loop, Stott returns to the question that burns in the heart of every torch songwriter: When it hurts so bad, why does it feel so good?

There are only eight songs here, but for the first time Stott assigns a singer to each one. Skidmore’s glassy, opera-trained articulation now alternates with the dreamy velveteen tones of Cork-based singer and musician Elaine Howley (who turned up on Modern Love last year with a torch-song 7″ of her own). In strikingly direct fragments, the two singers narrate the final act of a relationship under pressure—the late stages of grief for a love gone cold.

Howley makes her first appearance between the prismatic chords and slow, scuffling percussion of “Something in mind,” a barren landscape that gives her addressee nowhere to hide: “Isn’t this how diamonds are made? Is it about time we escape?” On “2024-2,” Skidmore’s voice is phased in layers, leaving phrases poking out—“home sweet home,” “being alone”—like thorns waiting to scratch. Stott reaches new heights of majestic woe on “Songbird” (destined for repeat plays in the ’ber months), leaving his romantic Replicant synths to soak in a Mancunian drizzle, like tears in the rain. “You’re just trying to protect your heart,” sings Howley. “Is it love or sabotage?”

So this is a desolate album indeed, even in a catalog of records consistently and admiringly described as “knackered house.” Back in the 2010s, Stott cleared a path through the murky underbrush of dub techno and post-dubstep, arriving at an approach that pointed the way forward without needing to sound futuristic. That was the moment the clocks stopped for dance music—when the “continuum” became an archive, prompting a cluster of artists to dig for inspiration and return to the cranky physicality of hardware. Stott’s early highlights were a respite from the pristine digitalism of the previous decade, later evolving into moments of shattered post-punk and melancholy trip-hop as he added Skidmore’s voice on 2012’s magnificent Luxury Problems. More recently, his albums have backed away from legible songwriting, instead burrowing deeper into dark, bludgeoning, eski-tipped beats.

On Late Loop, with two singers placed front and centre, there’s no mistaking a renewed desire to be heard and understood. That may also explain Stott’s self-imposed creative restrictions: The album contains no basslines, no reverb, and no effects except for a delay unit. What remains are the frail remnants of that signature Stottian heftiness, and several songs do feel underwhelming and slight on initial contact. But after a time, the album’s clear, stark lines start to acquire their own topography—as on “Sunday fast,” where the binary oppositions of human and machine get switched around to queasy effect. Skidmore’s voice is recorded dry, sealed inside the box and stripped of its acoustic in-place-ness (“On my throat, is your name/On my skin, paper thin,” she threatens) while Stott’s drum machine is played through speakers and re-recorded in the room, becoming three-dimensional in the process.

It’s all very unsettling, and the feeling persists on “The hardest thing,” where Rowley’s close-mic’d voice cuts through like a sickly whisper over the blare of a pump organ. The volume is wrong in all the right ways, like a cassette tape of ’80s home-recorded pop. On “Cold Welcome,” buffeted by cicada hi-hats and the pop of a wonky 808 cowbell, Skidmore repeatedly locates a flat note that leaves her exposed, flapping in the wind just as she hits the L-word: “I can still feel love….” It’s so wrong it must be right, an off-kilter conviction that harks back to Laurel Halo’s experiments with unvarnished vocals, and the froideur of Inga Copeland or Jenny Hval.

Limitations are the doorway to creativity, and in committing to that process Stott sounds like an artist who’s trying to finally subordinate form to content—to shake off the incessant focus on his oh-so-special production techniques, and redirect attention to what’s actually being said. The narrative concludes on the title track, offering something like a resolution, however fucked up, over seven glacial minutes: “You mean everything to me/But I just need a different way to be, don’t cry.” As “Late Loop” gains altitude, Stott breaks through the cloud cover and arrives on a blindingly bright plateau, reaching the kind of icy emotional peak more often attempted on a Traumprinz or even a Moby record (complimentary). If he never again has cause to write such a nakedly heartbroken record, that’s probably for the best. Probably.