The Shadow of Their Suns

Wax Tailor returns with The Shadow of Their Suns, his first studio album in five years and one of the first high-profile electronic records of 2021. Released on 8 January via his own Lab’Oratoire imprint, it picks up where 2015’s Dusty Rainbow from the Dark left off, wrapping the Parisian producer’s signature cinematic trip hop around a guest cast that reads like a roll-call of the genre’s finest voices — Mark Lanegan, Del the Funky Homosapien, Mr. Lif, D Smoke, Yugen Blakrok, Rosemary Standley, Boog Brown and, via a sample, the late Gil Scott-Heron.

The collaborations are the record’s beating heart. Just a Candle pairs Lanegan’s weathered baritone with a slow, smoky groove — warm organ chords and a muted, shuffling beat that conjures the last hour of a basement club at dawn. It’s the album’s most affecting moment, Lanegan’s voice settling into the arrangement as though it was always meant to sit there. Everybody, by contrast, is vintage Wax Tailor: Del the Funky Homosapien and Mr. Lif trading verses over a dusty, head-nodding bounce that feels like a long-lost late-90s hip hop 12”, all warm bass and crackling vinyl texture.

The most striking moment is the briefest: Paint It Black, a 29-second interlude built around a sample of Gil Scott-Heron, his voice hanging ghostly over sparse piano. It’s a masterstroke of restraint — the weight of one of spoken word’s greats delivered in half a minute, proof that Wax Tailor still knows exactly how to deploy a sample for maximum effect.

Elsewhere the album deepens its mood. Misery gives Rosemary Standley a mournful ballad of picked strings and hushed brass, while Keep It Movin finds D Smoke gliding over a brighter, funkier bounce and Dusk to Dusk pairs Yugen Blakrok’s formidable flow with creeping, cinematic tension. The instrumentals — On the Air, Like This, The Light — sustain the filmic quality that has always defined his work, the strings and strings of samples woven into something that plays less like a club record and more like a score.

If anything, The Shadow of Their Suns occasionally errs towards the tasteful, its polish sanding off some of the grit of Wax Tailor’s early work, and the extended edition on streaming services nearly doubles the runtime with instrumentals — but the core 13 tracks make a coherent, confident statement. Five years between albums is a long time in electronic music, yet this feels unhurried rather than overdue: cinematic, measured and quietly assured. It was worth the wait.