Bleep

The excitement that comes with a returned and reformed Sandwell District doesn’t just include an album and tour dates, but a generous peek at how their new material took shape too. Alongside End Beginnings, their second album as a collective with their first new music in over a decade, Sandwell District offer a selection of demos from the album, showing the tracks in their intriguing nascent states.

Where End Beginnings captures the dense and heavy pummel of the electronic underground Sandwell helped build, these demos are more lofi and lowkey, mistier and mysterious. Elusive harmonic synths gradually emerge and coalesce throughout the course of these tracks, like the twitchy ‘Self-Initiate’ releasing vapour and voltage, whose album version is even more nervous and frantic. That’s not to say they’re missing some bite in these early forms; while ‘Restless’ shifts into almost sci fi territory with its pensive and sizzling chords, its fuzzy, revolving rhythms truly are restless as they keep up the shuffles and wallops without ever settling.

And as the acidic growls, layers of drums, and tactile, rocky beats collide, these demos give a literal underground feel, stalactites and all. The skeletal rhythm of ‘Incubation’ slowly comes to life, its primal, cavernous electro sound eventually injected with warm texture echoing a golden era of electronica. With dripping beats and murky, gurgling bass, it’s an ethereal soundbath set to a hypnagogic club pulse. ‘Dreaming’ meanwhile paces out currents of ambience into an extended, molten breakdown, evoking a long trancelike ritual or a hypnotic dancefloor experience.

End Beginnings Demos is a tantalising look at the inner workings of one of Sandwell District’s most highly anticipated records yet.