Reflection

Just over a year ago, Loraine James announced herself with For You And I, a debut album that folded garage, jungle and raw noise into a startlingly personal whole. Reflection, her second album for Hyperdub, is a quieter, stranger follow-up: eleven tracks of pared-back IDM and ambient, flecked with drill and R&B, written in the suspended, anxious time of lockdown.

Where For You And I looked outward, Reflection turns the lens firmly inward. It plays like a diary of confinement, the track titles sketching a portrait of insecurity and low-level dread—Insecure Behaviour And Fuckery, Self Doubt (Leaving The Club Early)—that feels horribly recognisable. James sets these confessionals against the sparest backdrops of her career so far, leaving plenty of room for the unease to breathe.

The production is a winnowing-down of her toolkit. Built To Last opens the record with processed strings and a slow, hesitant pulse; Let’s Go pairs off-kilter drums with a bassline that flexes like elastic; and Black Ting is the most rhythmically restless cut here, its drill-influenced hi-hats flickering over muted pads. The ambient interlude Reflection and the seven-minute Change show her patience, letting textures develop unhurriedly and never forcing a climax.

Guest vocalists add further shading. Baths’ featherlight voice drifts through On The Lake Outside like a memory, whilst Eden Samara, Iceboy Violet, Le3 bLACK, Nova and Xzavier Stone each make their mark, their R&B-inflected deliveries humanising the otherwise stark electronics. James treats their voices as just another element in the mix, EQ’d and coloured until they feel like part of the furniture rather than impositions on it.

Reflection won’t announce itself as loudly as its predecessor, and that’s very much the point. It’s a record about the quiet work of sitting with yourself, and James has made it with a kind of honesty that’s easy to overlook and hard to fake. One of the year’s most striking experimental albums—and one of its most human.