ZULI: Lambda Album Assessment | Pitchfork

For so long as he’s been placing out music, ZULI has stayed two steps forward. The Egyptian producer switches up kinds not simply from document to document, however typically from track to track. His debut EP encompassed noise-rap beats, lo-fi techno, Detroit-inspired futurism, and crickets chirping over bell tones. The leaps between releases are even larger: After the intense abstraction of his moody 2018 LP Terminal, wherein hip-hop and footwork have been pulled aside on the seams, ZULI sank his tooth right into a set of no-holds-barred breakbeat smashers on 2021’s ALL CAPS EP. A Cairo native, the artist born Ahmed El Ghazoly spent a lot of his childhood in London earlier than returning to the Egyptian capital, a double displacement that he says gave him his sense of restlessness. “I believe the transfer between nations instilled an urge to insurgent in opposition to my environment,” he informed an interviewer in 2021. He was speaking about his desire for “area of interest” sounds over well-liked kinds, however he’s simply as reluctant to calm down into a distinct segment of his personal making. Now, on Lambda—his first main launch in six years—he alters course but once more, jettisoning the rhythmic power and focus of his earlier information in favor of a spellbinding fusion of environment and texture that spills over with nebulous emotion.

Lambda opens like a dawn over a ruined metropolis, huge chords of cinematic scope and symphonic grandeur swelling and morphing. A lurching electro rhythm rises and fades, dashing and slowing earlier than abruptly falling silent, however what actually drives the motion are the tiny vibrations rippling throughout the floor of the music, a riot of unpredictability. ZULI’s productions have all the time felt unstable, however they’ve by no means been extra precarious than they’re right here. His chords are a swampy morass; his textures shudder like floor liquefying in an earthquake, minuscule particles all of a sudden gushing in streams and bursts.

This palette—a thick slurry of buzzing synths and blown-out distortion—carries throughout the breadth of the album, lending a sense of uniform intent that makes it essentially the most cohesive launch in his catalog. Regardless of the extremity of the sound design, Lambda steadily seems like ZULI’s try at pop. In “Trachea,” a closely processed voice groans and gurgles over chords that gleam with the imposing majesty of Jean-Michel Jarre; in “Syzygy,” UK-born, Hamburg-based performer MICHAELBRAILEY’s shrill falsetto soars above a shapeshifting backdrop of synths and piano that’s paying homage to Arca’s mutant assemblages. Nearly all of the album’s tracks characteristic some kind of singing, normally woven deep into the gelatinous combine. “Syzygy” kicks off an interconnected three-song suite wherein voice and synths alike are floor to mud; in “Plateau,” a spotlight, Abdullah Miniawy’s mournful incantations twist like smoke, twined with melancholy clarinet and a tremolo determine that delightfully, nevertheless by chance, remembers the Smiths’ “How Quickly Is Now.”