Rare, Forever

Three years on from Leon Vynehall’s acclaimed Nothing Is Still comes Rare, Forever, his first full-length for Ninja Tune and a sharp swerve away from the genial disco of his early EPs. Where Nothing Is Still turned the British seaside into glowing, widescreen ambience, its successor digs into something darker: ten tracks of pagan-flavoured house, knotted techno and heat-haze ambience, presented as the transmission of a long-lost cassette rescued from a car boot sale.

The concept is worn lightly, but the atmosphere it conjures saturates every groove. Drums feel hand-played and slightly wrong-footed, as though recorded in a village hall rather than a studio; voices arrive processed and distant, half-sung, half-chanted. Where the old Vynehall records glided, these tracks stalk. There is still warmth in the pads and plenty of his signature vinyl hiss, but the reverb runs deeper and the basslines sit lower: house music viewed through a folkloric, faintly unsettling lens.

Opener Ecce! Ego! sets the tone with a swell of warped choral voices and clattering, tom-heavy percussion—the first of several moments where the album feels less like a club record than a ritual you have stumbled into. Mothra is the closest thing to a calling card: across its five and a half minutes it builds from a damp, hypnotic pulse into a breathless gallop, synth strings fraying at the edges as the pace refuses to relent. Alichea Vella Amor drifts in on dubbed-out keys and half-heard harmonies, all sway and no rush.

Snakeskin ∞ Has-Been is the album’s most unsettling stretch, its eerie vocal loop twisting the pastoral imagery into something nearer nightmare, whilst Dumbo supplies the most straightforward four-to-the-floor moment—locked-in groove, fizzing hats, chords that slide towards dissonance just when you expect resolution. After the brief ambience of An Exhale, Farewell! Magnus Gabbro closes the main body of the record with a sprawling, percussive centrepiece, and the twinkling All I See Is You, Velvet Brown provides a tender denouement of tape hiss and piano.

Rare, Forever is not an easy record, and it will not be to everyone’s taste—the hooks are buried deep and the payoffs take patience. But it is a strikingly confident move from an artist who has already proved he can do the pretty stuff. The production is immaculate throughout, every texture placed with care, and the record’s strange, pagan heart beats clearly beneath the surface. Bold, odd and ultimately impossible to shake: rare, indeed.