Spiral

DARKSIDE — the duo of Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington — return with Spiral, their second album and their first since 2013’s Psychic, released this week on Matador Records. In the eight years between records, Jaar built one of electronic music’s most restless catalogues — solo records, his Against All Logic alias, countless collaborations — whilst Harrington issued a run of exploratory solo albums. That both of them kept circling back to this project says plenty; that they’ve made it count says even more.

Spiral picks up exactly where the pair left off: Jaar’s warped electronics and Harrington’s guitar fused into a sound that has always felt like psych-rock fed through a club filter. The Limit, the record’s first single, sets the tone — a lurching, four-to-the-floor groove smothered in smoke, Harrington’s treated guitar lines coiling around Jaar’s half-whispered vocal. Nothing here resolves cleanly; that’s the point.

Narrow Road and I’m the Echo are the murk at its most inviting, all woozy bass and reverb-drenched percussion, whilst The Question Is To See It All stretches the formula into something approaching spiritual drift, the groove hanging back and letting the textures breathe. The pair’s chemistry remains the record’s quiet superpower — Jaar’s rigorous, rhythmic sensibility never quite tames Harrington’s freewheeling guitar, and the friction between the two is where the music lives.

The inclusion of Lawmaker, first released as a standalone single back in 2018, makes sense in context — it slots into the record’s second half as the most propulsive thing here, its hypnotic bassline and clattering percussion pushing furthest towards the dancefloor. The title track Spiral doubles down on the claustrophobia, a slow, slinking descent, whilst Liberty Bell is the standout — a frantic, krautrock-adjacent four minutes where Harrington’s guitar finally gets to howl over Jaar’s relentless machine rhythm.

Inside Is Out There and Only Young close the record at its most expansive and most vulnerable respectively, the former an eight-and-a-half-minute build into pure noise-funk abandon, the latter a near-lullaby that lets the duo’s softer side show. It’s a strange, patient, occasionally uncomfortable listen — and that’s precisely why it works. Eight years is a long time to wait for a follow-up, but Spiral makes the case that DARKSIDE simply weren’t finished saying what they had to say.