For That Beautiful Feeling

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From the instant that a disorienting, time-stretched vocal loop collides with a rock-steady four-to-the-floor beat in the brief but invigorating “Intro,” it’s clear that The Chemical Brothers are here to rave. The duo’s 10th album, their first since 2019’s <i>No Geography</i>, is a no-holds-barred attempt to channel all the energy and euphoria of their live shows into the album format, and it’s a testament to their success that the record’s compact, 47-minute runtime can barely contain all the four-dimensional dynamism within. It’s even sequenced like a DJ mix, careening almost seamlessly across gnarly acid banger, slow-motion big-beat throwback, and the sorts of stadium-sized, hands-in-the-air, sun-emerging-from-behind-the-clouds anthems that they do better than just about anyone. The duo’s Tom Rowlands tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that the album came together in pursuit of “the moment of feeling like something is lifting off in the studio.” That’s the perfect metaphor for “Live Again”: The song’s opening bars of surging shoegaze swirl, segueing directly out of “Intro,” have all the pent-up energy of a NASA launchpad, and once the song kicks off—serenaded by a dulcet refrain from Paris’ Halo Maud—it just keeps rocketing upward, propelled by endlessly rising glissandi. They describe their approach as a kind of deconstruction—“Sometimes you start with a quite songy song, but then you spend about three years destroying that song,” says Rowlands—and it’s audible in “No Reason,” a late-night epic that’s stripped down to little more than funk ba, extended snare roll, and the occasional crowd-stoking whoop. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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