Lust for Youth had been by no means fairly as frigid as they appeared. Even on 2012’s Rising Seeds, the minimalist, abrasive solo debut of Swedish producer Hannes Norrvide, a music like “Champagne” yearned to pop a cork and hit the dancefloor. And by the point the coldwave revival started to thaw, Norrvide’s challenge had expanded twice—first into a duo with Malthe Fischer, then a trio, bringing in Posh Isolation label co-founder Loke Rahbek—and begun to dip its toes into the hotter waters of seaside disco and balearic pop. All Worlds, the group’s new full-length collaboration with Rahbek’s Croatian Amor moniker, lastly commits to a decade-plus’ price of flirtations: It is a summer season file by means of and thru, engineered for windows-down automobile rides alongside the coast, beachside cabana bars, and Ibiza discothèques. As soundtrack, temper music, vibe, All Worlds prospers; underneath nearer inspection, it may resemble a lesser sum of its references. Tantalizing however not at all times satisfying, the album summons a collection of itches that the songs can’t fairly scratch.
Rahbek departed Lust for Youth a while between 2016’s Compassion and 2019’s Depeche Mode-worshipping self-titled file, which means the split-billed All Worlds doubles as a full-band reunion. After a lot collaboration and mutual affect, it’s not at all times clear the place Norrvide and Fischer’s work ends and Croatian Amor’s begins. All three are keen on widescreen, echoing guitars and driving lite-industrial rhythms, although 2013’s wonderful Pomegranate, the final LP credited to each acts, forayed into new age-y ambiance. The brand new album doesn’t sound like Pomegranate; as an alternative, it island hops from DJ Koze’s bucolic techno (“Kokiri”) to Air France’s seaside sampledelia (“Dummy”) to Jamie xx’s pirate radio two-step (“Fleece”). “Passerine” stands out as new territory for the trio—a Cocteau Twins rip so uncanny that you might layer in Elizabeth Fraser’s “Iceblink Luck” glossolalia virtually unchanged. In stretching to embody a universally sun-drenched ideally suited, All Worlds generally looks like a singles compilation as an alternative of a unified assertion.
That is, not less than partially, by design. Whereas making All Worlds, Norrvide, Fischer, and Rahbek drew inspiration from the Golden Document aboard the 1977 Voyager house probes, etched with pictures, multilingual greetings, and sounds of Earth ostensibly aimed toward an extraterrestrial viewers. What press supplies describe because the trio’s try and seize a “kaleidoscopic view of the human expertise” finally ends up like a veritable inkblot take a look at for the final 20 years of indie dance. Tilt opening observe “Friendzone” a technique and catch the shearing synths that might’ve been lifted whole-cloth from Rustie’s Glass Swords; one other and the hesitant, digitized vocal pattern begins to sound like SOPHIE’s “Infatuation.” These phantoms crop up all through, gestures at nostalgia that have a tendency to return off a bit inventory. The spoken first line of “Lights within the Heart” (“Spherical rock… it’s the place we’d cover and smoke cigarettes”) hints at youthful escapism à la M83, however the accompanying music—a water balloon of beatific, aimless noise that retains filling up till it spontaneously deflates—doesn’t know ship on them.
