Grotto

When object blue released her debut EP Do you plan to end a siege? in 2018, she marked herself out as one of the most singular new voices in experimental club music—a record that folded theatre, autobiography and forensic sound design into four restless tracks of gnarled techno. Three years on, she returns to the label that first championed her, Tobago Tracks, with Grotto: five tracks released alongside a live-streamed audio-visual premiere, and a record that has already drawn the kind of press attention—Resident Advisor, Fact, DJ Mag, XLR8R—usually reserved for artists working some way beyond the mainstream.

The theatrical frame is set by the EP’s bookends. Opened Close and Closed Open are short, wordless passages of treated voice and cavernous reverb, and together they place the record in a space that feels more like a stage than a club—fitting for an artist whose work has always treated the dance floor as a site of performance. The title conjures a hollowed-out chamber, and the production obliges: everything is close-mic’d and breathy, dropped into swathes of long, decayed reverb that give even the percussion a sense of live, physical space.

Fugitive’s Flourish introduces the EP’s central tension over a broken, half-stepping rhythm, a processed vocal surfacing and sinking like something sung in the next room. The centrepiece is Exorcism of a Self-Help Book, the record’s longest track at four minutes, which pitches object blue’s voice into a chanting, quasi-ritualistic refrain above a lurching techno pulse, a sub bass flexing underneath. It’s gnarled, darkly funny and genuinely unsettling in equal measure—the title is the giveaway.

Procession of Healers is the closest Grotto comes to the dance floor proper, its four-to-the-floor kick and martial percussion building steadily as layers of treated voice gather around the groove like a choir arriving late. It’s the most propulsive moment on the EP, and it makes the brief return to the cave on Closed Open feel earned rather than decorative.

At under fourteen minutes, Grotto is a short, dense record, but it rewards the attention its staging demands. Every detail feels considered—the placement of the reverb tails, the granular processing of the voice, the way each track bleeds into the next—and the whole EP hangs together as a single theatrical gesture rather than a handful of club tracks. object blue has made a record that sounds like nobody else’s, and for an artist whose interests have always run beyond the dance floor, that’s exactly the right way to return.