It’s unfortunate timing that SBTRKT, pronounced “Subtract”, should make his comeback in the week that Ed Sheeran releases an album of the same name, but the Cambridgeshire producer Aaron Jerome is probably used to being overshadowed. When he first appeared at the start of the last decade, making a ghostly post-dubstep sound that also echoed the electronic soulfulness of Massive Attack, he wore a tribal mask to conceal his identity. The self-titled SBTRKT album in 2011 made stars out of its guest singers – Jessie Ware, who released her fifth album to much acclaim last week, and Sampha, who won the Mercury Prize for his solo work and went on to sing with Drake and Kendrick Lamar – not so much the producer in the background.
More recently, Jerome has been quieter still. Apart from 25 minutes of music in 2016, this is his first full length release in almost a decade. And it is long, with 22 tracks that feel like even more as he flits hyperactively between sounds and speeds within a single song. He says that he has written around 1,500 tracks since he last released anything. The Rat Road sounds like it’s crammed with as many of those ideas as possible.
