Sam Shepherd, aka Manchester-born multitasker Floating Points, speaks and acts like a true music fan. According to the producer, his new genre-spanning LP Crush reflects that moment “when you’re at home playing music with your friends and it’s going all over the place” – something we can all identify with.

Crush consolidates the many sides and sensibilities of Shepherd, charting the development of his multifarious brand as a club DJ, composer, label owner and producer across 12 tracks of complex electronica that take in strings-strewn stunners and modular synth meltdowns. The LP’s starting point is the UK bass scene from which he rose to fame during the late 2000s, and there’s an underlying history being mapped here.

Lead single LesAlpx tears through the album like a low-end wrecking ball, leaving behind a smattering of minimal bleeps. The track bristles with the kind of bass-heavy energy that can only be expended on the club floor. “I started going back to my early records and all the sounds I loved playing at clubs like Fabric and Plastic People,” Shepherd has said, of the track. “I wanted to capture the immediacy of that music and the feeling that I got when I was on the dancefloor, of being immersed in a track that pulls you along instantly.”

But Crush doesn’t feel like a nostalgia trip. The ambient breakbeat of Anasickmodular and garage-flavoured Bias may glean from the past, but the album pulses with a sense of urgency that leans towards the future. Here Shepherd has managed to capture both the febrile chaos and decaying beauty of the world we’re living in, on an album that crushes myriad ideas into one big sonic collision.

April Clare Welsh