Image by Steve Gullick
It’s criminal that Hybrid aren’t as instantly recognisable as their peers such as Aphex Twin or Massive Attack. The group’s acclaimed debut Wide Angle revolutionised the landscape of U.K breakbeat. It was an astute keying into the futurist anxieties of the turn of the millennium with its foreboding iconoclash of breakbeat, trance and rave styles. The cinematic and progressive sound of Wide Angle would go on to practically invent the diagram for contemporary drum and bass, and would inform the practice of modern visionaries such as deadmau5. To call Hybrid pioneers wouldn’t be unfounded. They’ve succeeded in achieving a reputation for technologically sleek and future-forward productions. But they’ve mostly defined their legacy on their own terms. Over the course of their two decades in the game, they have expanded their exploration of genres and harnessed their innate filmic quality to compose soundtracks for cinema and video games. They have been an ever changing roster of contributors, but at the core has always been sound designer Mike Truman and from 2007, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Charlotte Truman whose voice shifted Hybrid’s breakbeats towards more pop leaning territories.
For their sixth album Black Halo, the Trumans add guitarist Stu Morgan and drummer Simon Hanson to the lineup on what is one of Hybrid’s most sleek and diverse records to date. Released on Distinctive Records, Black Halo is very much a product of the band’s creative evolution up to this point, if not its culmination. Musically the album embraces Hybrid’s compositional stint but also stays true to their origins. Fusing their signature jagged breakbeats with moments of orchestral strings, acoustic guitar and piano passages, Hybrid formulate a gargantuan electro-opera across eleven tracks. Black Halo also returns to the dark millennial disquiet that defined their early sound, standing in contrast to 2018’s sunnier Light of the Fearless. The album carries the same gravitas of a moody sci-fi drama in the vein of Interstellar, which makes it sweepingly cinematic and full of climatic moments. The music is full of detail, from subtle electronic buzzes and machine sounds that bookend tracks to endlessly rich layers of sonic textures. This creates full and captivating experiences, such as the Highland melodrama of Seven Days or the drum and bass balladry of Come Back To Me.
The kinetic action of Flashpoint opens the record mid-story. The bravado of an electric guitar solo against warbling bass stabs makes for an electric opening credits sequence, before crashing into the softer Los Angels which introduces Truman’s vocals. Black Halo features a good number of ballads in between its extraterrestrial espionage, such as Carry Me Home which gives room for Truman’s voice to take over narrative duties. Mostly, her performance across Black Halo avoids overly wrought operatics a la Evanescence, instead seasoning the music with pop theatrics while allowing it to do all the seething. Tracks like No One Knows and Truth From the Lies are most successful in synthesising the extensive and diverse components which Hybrid work with here. No One Knows opens with a strummed acoustic guitar, but quickly mutates into a pulsing synthpop cut with breathtaking layers of electronic and organic sound. The dubstep synths which warp into the song’s centre feel entirely correct, compared to a litany of other songs who have tried the same trick over the years to less striking results (Alex Clare comes immediately to mind). Here, they cut and writhe through the beat with a distinct sense of edge that elevates No One Knows into an electro-theatrical masterpiece.
Truth From the Lies recalls the electroclash of Vitalic, and unleashes a modulating techno synth line that squeals over Hanson’s drum kit before surrendering to Truman’s louche cabaret vocals. It’s as if the greatest punk rock show of the 80’s were hosted on Mars and performed entirely by Steve Strange in drag. Elsewhere, Nails is also a powerful standout. The tribal house beat that explodes after a glam rock chorus from Truman swerves the direction of the track before being joined by the organic thunder of Hanson’s drums, providing one of Black Halo’s most unbarred and exhilarating moments. For Hybrid purists, while you’re bound to recognise them on Come Back To Me and Flashpoint, Voices in the Static is the most natural progression from their early work to where they are now. A distorted and stuttering industrial breakbeat cut, it simmers into a hauntingly ominous orchestral outro.
Black Halo is an incredibly rich album, featuring some of the most distinctive and detailed production of Hybrid’s career. It’s largely a collage of influences and references, pulling from the band’s own history and the motifs of contemporary pop, rock and EDM. As an amalgamation of their past with their present, Black Halo becomes a sort of blueprint for the band’s future. It’s sophisticated, evolved music that somehow honours but also defies every genre it references by refusing to settle. In this sense, it is one of the most distinct electro-pop releases of the year and possibly in the past while. Entirely immersive, stunningly theatrical and intelligently synthesised, Black Halo is a glorious return to form for a group of visionaries whose indelible influence on electronic music continues to push the boundaries of the form today.
Watch the gripping music video for Nails below, and download Black Halo here.
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