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No matter who Sam Shackleton plays with, you recognize his handiwork immediately: Since he began weaving together North African percussion and dubstep-inspired basslines more than two decades ago, he’s developed one of the most distinctive styles in electronic music. He long ago shed virtually all traces of conventional UK bass music, effectively evolving into a genre of one. Dubstep was always a misnomer for his music, which never stepped, but flowed.
The strength of Shackleton’s signature is all the more remarkable given the breadth of his collaborations, particularly lately. In the past decade, the British-born, Berlin-based artist has worked with the experimental Portuguese post-fado singer Marlene Ribeiro; Japanese extreme bass provocateur Scotch Rolex and Ugandan drummer Omutaba; Holy Tongue, the trio of Valentina Magaletti, Al Wootton, and Susumu Mukai; new weird America torchbearer Six Organs of Admittance; Polish clarinetist Wacław Zimpel and Hindustani classical singer Siddhartha Belmannu; dystopian Berlin dreamweaver Anika; and even maverick Italian opera singer and actor Ernesto Tomasini, whose roles include a one-man act called True or Falsetto? A Secret History of the Castrati.
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Euphoria Bound, Shackleton’s first solo release in three years, sounds first and foremost like a Shackleton record. It shares the same mystical air and weird, opalescent sheen of all his music going back to at least 2012’s Music for the Quiet Hour/The Drawbar Organ EPs; any differences are differences in degree, not kind. Still, it stands apart from his last solo albums, 2023’s The Scandal of Time and 2021’s Departing Like Rivers: It sounds more muscular, more intense. His vortiginous energy, a kind of all-enveloping whorl, has accelerated.
The sounds—rattling hand drums, groaning sub-bass, dubbed-out tendrils of synthesizer, and ghostly chants—may be the same, but the music teems with more movement than ever. Confronted with its kinetic excess, you might imagine impenetrable rainforests, buckets of squirming eels, The Last of Us’ cannibalistic cordyceps. The new album feels almost unsettlingly alive, as though Shackleton’s ideas were spawning mutant offspring right before our eyes.
We dive right in with “Elemental Dream”: After just two bars of relatively unadorned drums and what might be zither, the whole thing explodes into an unstable tangle of disjointed voices, kalimba, serrated synths, and drums, drums, drums. With the exception of an eerie choral miasma that floats in the background, everything tonal is percussive and everything percussive is tonal, leaving you buffeted on all sides by soft, colorful wallops, as though suspended in a tornado of beanbags. Despite the density, Shackleton is careful to leave breathing room, periodically stripping away voices and placing focus on the swirling motion of dub delay.
All 10 tracks share the same basic patterns and palette, but spend enough time spelunking through Euphoria Bound’s labyrinthine depths, and they begin to differentiate themselves. “Philistine Wavelength” features what sound like dripping drainpipes and drums that crunch like old snow. The ominous drones and thudding toms of “Contagious Illusions” guard ghostly piano riffs, and the piano returns in “When Memory Ceases,” this time as modal jazz runs projected through an electric fan. In both “Crushing Realities” and “The Soul of Everything,” looped voices spread apart like feathers. On a few tracks, speeding and slowing pitch-bending effects give the impression of funhouse mirrors twisting in place, or the exaggerated movements of a Looney Tunes cartoon.
Despite the outward sameness of the music, there’s a wealth of detail to be discovered. It took me a dozen plays before I realized what the gamelan-like melody of closer “Buried and Irretrievable” reminded me of: the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.” I’m sure that’s accidental, but once I heard the anthemic riff in the song’s rising and falling mallet patterns, I couldn’t unhear it. I took it as a useful lesson: As much as you may think you know what to expect on a Shackleton album, he’s bound to surprise you.
