Album Review: Jon Hopkins - Singularity

Hopkins has finally followed up his now five-year-old breakthrough album, Immunity.

According to Hopkins, Singularity was inspired by meditation and trance states; it seems he achieved some fairly pleasant inner states since much of this comeback record shimmers with positive vibrations.

The opening title track features many of his trademarks, as intensity typically builds from a fuzz of drones and distortion before emerging into focus. But for a forward-thinking artist, merely repeating what you're best at is never going to be enough; there has to be some sort of development or progress. The first single, Emerald Rush, provides just this as swirls of dismembered vocals and synth washes ebb and flow over a lumbering beat. There are some more familiar elements elsewhere, though, as the churning thump and celestial echo of Everything Connected is somewhat reminiscent of Open Eye Signal. Similarly, Echo Dissolve and Recovery are the gentle, ambient breathing spaces that we've encountered before with Hopkins. It's great to see Hopkins working again, but someone ought to tell him that the law of diminishing returns applies to repeatedly used formulae.