Pye Corner Audio finishes his trilogy of albums – following 2016’s “Stasis” and 2019’s “Hollow Earth” – with this high budget tribute to vintage synth crust, dystopian lost futures and squashed dancefloor memories.

Could there be a more appropriate home for Martin Jenkins than Ghost Box? His latest album characterizes everything that the label stands for, building a strong theme immediately with Jenkins’ peerless production skill and leaving the throng of other vintage synth fetishists in the dust. It’s hardly surprising that Pye Corner Audio has been picked up for so much TV work recently, he sounds as if his music is umbilically joined to a set of cathode memories: blinking images of Doctor Who, 1980’s Channel 4 documentaries, late night horror shows, Open University idents.

We’ve heard Jenkins’ dusted retro-future electronics plenty of times now, and at this point he’s just enjoying the ride; the squelchy sci-fi moods of ‘Paleolith’ are a perfect intro to ‘Earthwork’, where the album bugs from acidic squelching to knackered dancefloor froth. And while the shadow of Boards of Canada looms over so much retro synth music, Jenkins reaches his own distinct conclusions.

‘Hive Mind’ twists toughened disco rhythms and modulated arpeggios into a horror theme dancefloor jam that’s two clicks left of the TV dial. ‘Phantom Orchid’ is another slow burner, sounding like Vangelis if he was given the opportunity to rescore John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. Basically, imagine Johnny Jewel, Alessandro Cortini, S U R V I V E, and Dean Hurley going b2b at the purgatorium disco and you have the measure of it.