If you believe the accompanying press release, Glasgow-born, LA-based Ross Birchard has spent the six years since his last album as Hudson Mohawke engaged in variety of intriguing activities. The sometime Kanye West and Drake producer has variously set up barbecues outside clubs, ready to feed bleary-eyed ravers at 7am; running “Bob Ross-style” art classes for his fellow electronic auteurs and conducting a 12-step programme designed to rid people of irony. The reality seems to be that he’s spent recent years thinking about his past. In 2020, he put out three mixtapes of previously unreleased archive material, some of it dating back to the mid-00s. His new album, meanwhile, harks back even further, to the kind of bouncy happy hardcore popular in Scotland when he was a kid, which presumably trickled into his life via radio and rave tape packs.
