Blood

Shanghai’s club scene has spent years pushing its producers into the international conversation, and Laughing Ears — the alias of a video-game sound designer based in the city — has quietly become one of its most distinctive voices. Resident Advisor reviewed Blood on the day of its release, calling her “a standout in an already mind-blowing Shanghai club scene”, and it’s hard to disagree. Out now on Infinite Machine as IM086, this ten-track second album is a concept record built around the Norse myth of Fenrir, the wolf the gods raised and then bound for fear of him.

The record opens in a state of deliberate unease. Flickering Shadows builds its rhythm from fragments—kicks that slip off the grid, snares that crack and vanish—over granular texture that drifts rather than drives. Loki, at under three minutes, is the album’s most direct gesture, the trickster father arriving on stuttering, footwork-adjacent percussion and a synth motif that seems to chase its own tail. By Untouched Places the drums have receded almost entirely, leaving widescreen pads and the hiss of field recordings to occupy the space.

The title track Blood is where concept and sound fuse. A patient four-to-the-floor kick anchors eerie, processed vocal fragments whilst pads hover somewhere between comfort and menace; Night Wisps stretches the same mood across five minutes of reverb tails and barely-there melody. Murderous Means, the most physical moment here, lets a churning bassline and fractured, jungle-adjacent breaks suggest the violence the myth keeps off stage.

The second half loosens the grip. Buona Fortuna offers the record’s most melodic moment, a tentative piano motif set against skittering percussion, and both Glimmer and the six-minute Potcheen explore the near-ambient territory hinted at earlier, letting drones and processed field recordings carry the weight. Warm as a Lizard closes with a quiet, almost fragile warmth—an unexpected end for an album about a wolf the gods feared.

As a second album, Blood is an impressive act of consolidation. The drum programming is fractured but never messy, the sound design hyperreal but never showy, and the Fenrir concept is worn lightly enough that the record works whether or not you arrive with the myth in mind. It rewards patience—and makes a strong argument that Laughing Ears belongs alongside the scene Resident Advisor is right to champion.