Angus Finlayson’s debut LP arrives after years of releasing reliably compelling music, from 2014’s weirdo house excursions on Noble Gas, to the sheer adventure of 2017’s Volumes. His is club-adjacent music, and he is one of those rare experts who can make something interesting happen every four bars.

The opener on Second Language is akin to a dramatis personae: a sequence of disconnected sounds which feature on the record. An organ shimmers, there’s the chime of a gamelan bell, an airy swell of synth, and then a curio – this time a recording of someone plucking a guitar’s open strings, before clearing their throat, presumably in preparation.

It’s a useful piece, familiarising us with some of the constituent parts – or vocabulary, to borrow Finlayson’s linguistics theme – of a complex, genre-agnostic body of work. The major omission is rhythm, which on Second Language varies as much in tempo and temperament as the verbal interactions experienced over a lifetime. Balconies lurches with a heavy, oily swagger, whilst the playful Gone Rogue skips like a light-footed runner, cutting their way through rush hour traffic.

For Want of Gelt is a standout track, a high-speed, high-drama piece of electro driven by a Richter-scale rumbling of synth. It climaxes with a blindside rush of drum machine samples so common as to be cliché, but like a concrete poet does with words, Finlayson tests the limits of their meaning and use, wrenching out new possibilities.

Xavier Boucherat