Laurel Halo album – full details

One of the age's truest voices, mainframe techno artist Laurel Halo, announces debut album details.

As we excitedly announced the day before yesterday, Laurel Halo’s debut album would be released by Hyperdub in May. Now, the label (who have previously released Dummy favourites Darkstar, Terror Danjah, Ikonika and Burial) have confirmed things like artwork, tracklisting and release date. So, ‘Quarantine’ is out in late May, with Laurel brining her live show to the castle-y continent of Europe shortly after, notably for an appearance at Field Day in early June. The tracklisting is underneath the artwork, taken from a painting by Japanese artist Makoto Aida.

The album follows one of the strongest runs of releases in recent years. First appearing (to us) on Tri Angle record’s year zero release with a cover of Linsey Lohan’s Something I Never Had. The track was a simple but effective synth drift and laid out the Laurel Halo template well – sonically combining the terrifying vastness of ambient music with the techniques of hyper-melodic techno. Emotionally, it sounded both like the interminable complexity of modern high-tech society, a very wise woman and a sad ghost. This was followed by ‘King Felix’, an EP of pop songs which sound like the mainframe singing and ‘Hour Logic’, which takes the tropes of much electronic music and slams them against each, resulting in music perfect for its stated purpose of assisting mass transit systems, both on Hippos In Tanks. Along with a superb tape on NNA, it’s basically music so good and interesting and now, it makes every else sound 2D, and this album is officially exciting.