Siblings

It gets harder for an artist to truly startle in the 21st century as every evolutionary niche gets filled, and every obscure genre becomes familiar, but New Yorker in Berlin Colin Self manages it and then some. This is their first album proper, but also the culmination of a three-year long creative project that began with 2015’s self-released Elation. On Siblings you can hear the radical disjunctions and hyper-synthetic tones of 2010s deconstructed club, the high drama of 80s stadium pop, the constant queer pulse of hi-NRG, and a kind of alien gospel: massed voices raised in celebration and ritual, but voices processed and harmonised into something post-human. Its imaginings of new possibilities for community will give you future shock and nostalgia all at once, even as you feel compelled to find out what is at the heart of its sci-fi bacchanal.