German veteran Robert Babicz has spent three decades flitting between aliases—Rob Acid, Babiczstyle, the lot—but Utopia finds him at his most settled, a sprawling eighth album and his first full-length on Marc Romboy’s Systematic Recordings since the Butterfly LPs. It’s a record built on contrast: shimmering two-minute interludes bookending seven-minute melodic techno workouts, intimate vocals floating over colossal four-to-the-floor beats. The result is an album that feels both expansive and personal, a late-career statement with a surprisingly tender heart.
The sequencing does much of the work. Brief opener Childhood sets a nostalgic tone with airy, lo-fi pads, before Heartstone arrives with a deep, rolling bassline and a lead synth that glistens like morning light. Heroes keeps the energy bubbling with a driving rhythm and chunky, reverberant percussion, while Hotel Kalimba—exactly as the title suggests—slips in a gentle, plucked melody as a palate cleanser. These interludes aren’t filler; they’re the deep breaths between the big moments, and they give the album its shape.
The reworks are the record’s anchor points. Sonntag resurrects Babicz’s Kompakt classic, and the 2020 version keeps the bittersweet melody of the original while thickening the low end and letting the pads breathe over a taut, hypnotic groove. Sin, his debut cut for Systematic, gets a similarly considered reimagining—darker and more brooding, the bassline heavier, the atmosphere coiled with tension. Hearing both in sequence makes for a lovely dialogue between past and present.
The vocal collaborations add another shade. Zera appears twice, on Come Down and No One Else, her breathy, soulful delivery draped over warm basslines and gently swelling pads; the former, in particular, builds patiently across eight minutes before the melody finally opens up. Alice Rose closes the vocal chapter on Infinity Inside, a floaty, emotive number that feels like the album’s emotional summit, all reverb-drenched keys and a chorus that lingers long after the track fades.
The back end keeps the momentum. Climax does exactly what it says on the tin with a euphoric arpeggio and driving drums, while Garden of Souls offers a moment of hushed, reflective calm before the title track rounds things off: a near-nine-minute epic that stitches every theme of the record together, from the plucked melodies to the soaring pads, and lets them unfold at their own pace.
Utopia is a confident, warm-hearted record from a producer who has nothing left to prove and clearly knows it. It’s not flashy and it doesn’t need to be—the melodies are strong enough, the basslines deep enough, and the whole thing hangs together as a coherent journey rather than a collection of club tracks. A measured, mature return that rewards patient listening.
