I do a lot of my listening on my bike, albums come and albums go. It takes a very rare find to make me stop, take out my phone and work out what the hell am listening to. At the very first listen, “An Empire” absolutely floored me. Instead of carrying on with my infinite playlist I very carefully found somewhere to pull in and restarted it and then restarted again and then restarted again.

This is a slow, lo-fi album that is magnificent in its minimal beauty. There is so much here but it takes a long time for it to fully reveal its splendour, and that very much is its magic. It builds in momentum over its four distinct movements. Everything is glacially gradual with the pace slowly but steadily increasing. It is a gloriously beautiful album big in scope but still incredibly insular.

It is stunning, no note is wasted, and no refrain or passage is surplus to requirements. What you get is an exquisitely constructed continuous stream of music, expansive in scope but very much slight in touch. An absolute masterpiece.

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