Audiopile Review: Shop fave Matt Karmil returns after a four-year hiatus, arriving on the Studio Barnhaus imprint after his impressive stint of records on Smalltown Supersound and PNN. His previous album, 2020’s STS371, broke open his usual brand of submerged ambient-house with a turn towards Actress-esque hazy techno and blurred house loops. No Going Back sharpens that turn even further on parts of No Going Back, while still retaining elements of the swampy dance floor murk that drew us to him in the first place. Broken into several movements, No Going Back’s opening track, “SFP”, conjures the early work of The Field with its stuttering rhythms and micro-clipped vocal samples, before sliding into the hi hat frenzied title track, the hyped BPMs offset with Karma’s typically woozy chords. The middle section is more typical of the now foundational Karmil style, a plunge into deep rolling rhythms and eerie ambience that push towards darkened corners of the club. Even with a brighter punch at the start of the LP, he eventually descends down to the final track, simply titled “15 mins”, the near-side-long track playing with a hypnotic loop comes off like a track culled from one of his 2010’s released played at 1/8th speed. Across the board, this is some of his finest work. Let’s just hope we don’y have to wait another four years for his next drop.

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Following a four-year hiatus from solo releases, the British musician Matt Karmil returns with the soft-focus gentle beauty and subtly stealthy beats of new LP, No Going Back. With inspired moments of creation happening incrementally, the album came together amidst a busy mixing/remixing/mastering/co-production schedule. Artists who’ve enlisted his multiple skills includes Bicep, Underworld, Mall Grab, Jayda G, DJ Koze, Neneh Cherry, Sofia Kourtesis, DJ Fett Burger, Matias Aguayo, and Carmen Villain. Feeling the benefits of this new approach, No Going Back is the strongest expression of Matt’s artistic vision to date, honing the spectrum of styles for which he’s renowned, all smudged together by a warm, gauzy haze. The microhouse anthem “SFP” is followed by the broken tech science of “No Going Back,” the spectral dub techno spookiness of “Old Haunts” and the sublime misty shimmer of “The Last Time.” Further switching things up is the oddball dancefloor experimentalism of “Still Something There,” the washed-out electroid balm of “Things Really Happen,” and the epic dark ambient closer “15 mins.”