On last year’s Agor, the much anticipated debut album from Lewis Roberts, AKA Koreless, the Welsh producer continued his pointillism-like approach to sound design and the qualities of the human voice. It was this approach that had turned him on to the radars of artists like FKA Twigs, with Lewis working behind the scenes to create the striking sonic dioramas of albums like M3LLI5X and Magdalene over the past decade. His scarce solo work over this time shares DNA with what Agor eventually became, drawing from the rich source of Celtic history and mythology to shape its chopped and glitched out sound.
Download and stream Droids here
Droids, his latest single, arrives just thirteen months after Agor and presents somewhat of a new direction for Lewis’s solo work. While the approach remains the same (chopped, syncopated structure, beads of sound scattered in quick succession), it’s the material that’s fresh for Koreless. On Droids, he exchanges the clipped syllables of Welsh chanting for rubbery 8-bit sounds and analog synths. It’s a retro sci-fi odyssey Koreless style; at times erratic and maniacal, at others blissed out and cosmic in scope. There’s an ever present feeling of rise glistening under the glitchy pads and synth riffs of Droids, an adventurous and triumphant sort of forward progression that works off the same nostalgia as the synthwave of the Stranger Things score. For Koreless, it’s an alarming pivot away from his usual gravitas and pathos. But it’s a change of pace that sends him hurtling into a new stratosphere that feels thrilling, leaving us genuinely excited and curious for whatever may come next.
Listen to Droids below.
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