BLACK METAL 2

Seven years on from the record that made him the art world’s favourite enigma, Dean Blunt returns with BLACK METAL 2, a ten-track collection that runs barely 22 minutes and lands on Rough Trade without so much as a press shot. Styled as a sequel to 2014’s BLACK METAL but built more like a sketchbook, it is the label’s most talked-about experimental record of the week—and it’s easy to hear why. This is Blunt at his most withholding: a record that gives you almost nothing and trusts you to meet it halfway.

Brevity is the governing principle. Nine of the ten tracks stay under three minutes and several barely clear ninety seconds, which suits material that feels less like songs than fleeting transmissions. Opener VIGIL sets the tone with a skeletal beat and a half-muffled synth motif that drifts in and out of focus, while SKETAMINE pushes a plaintive two-note piano figure through tape hiss until it starts to feel like a memory. DASH SNOW is almost jaunty in comparison, its clipped guitar line nudging towards the pop Blunt has always circled without ever committing.

The middle stretch is where the record’s strange charm concentrates. SEMTEX (1:27) is the most direct thing here, a bare drum machine pattern and a vocal that arrives already half-erased, and NIL BY MOUTH does its title justice, all restrained tension and withheld release. WOOSAH brings the most warmth, a dubby wobble of bass cushioned in static, before closer the rot—the longest track at 3:43—unfurls a genuinely lovely chord sequence that finally rewards the patience the rest of the album demands.

Sonically the record is drenched in the tape-hiss aesthetic that has defined Blunt’s recent output: nothing is crisp, everything sounds like it was captured in a room next door and played back through something older than it. The hiss isn’t decoration but texture, and it gives the skeletal production—thin drums, muted pads, vocals smeared to the edge of intelligibility—a hazy, nocturnal intimacy that’s easy to sink into.

BLACK METAL 2 is a difficult record to love and an easy one to admire. It will frustrate anyone expecting the loose R&B warmth of earlier work, but as a document of an artist working entirely on his own terms it’s quietly compelling. Twenty-two minutes, ten half-songs, and more atmosphere than most full-lengths manage twice over. Rough Trade were right to make it their record of the week.