This is not a happy album. And while not all listeners will find solace in its depressive tones, it is difficult to not appreciate its expansive sound palette and unflinching creativity.
Drawing heavily from hip-hop and house, Slow Focus transports 52 minutes of sustainable synth through valleys of watery beats and crunchy rhythms.
It unveils its magic over multiple listens, proving to be exemplary of the concept of delayed gratification.
Such is the triumph of Slow Focus: visceral but poised, mannered but emotionally lucid, seductive but astringent, cacophonous but, yes, focused, the album finds Hung and Power charting kaleidoscopic tableaux out of giddy contradictions with the confidence of dancefloor pros.
Though it’s hardly labyrinthine–these songs proceed in pretty much a linear fashion–Slow Focus immerses the listener in an aural landscape that offers so much to explore.
Power and Hung have made either the year's most introverted party album or the most expansive loner's album; either way, there are few albums this year that offer this much space to get lost in.
The duo have put together a wonderful album on which they manage to take most of the electronic world to task.
Slow Focus displays an act from a niche genre deftly handling the necessities and opportunities that come with sudden, rapid ascendance
Following up the excellent Street Horrrsing and Tarot Sport was never going to be an easy task but Fuck Buttons have done it with utter aplomb and in doing so have delivered one of the year’s finest records.
Their most scattershot effort yet, Slow Focus is also their best, a commanding compendium of masterfully complex music that's bound only by a common pattern of roving restlessness.
Slow Focus isn’t alienating, it’s other, and it’s a pleasure to take a wander around its unfamiliar landscapes.
Fuck Buttons have always been pioneers to some extent, and it’s fitting that they’ve again done something insistently theirs.
It is all-consuming and consistently impressive from the off
Slow Focus is Fuck Buttons' fullest realization of this Third Way yet, a masterful synthesis of seemingly incompatible elements into a full-on maelstrom of churning rhythms and power-drill drones.
The build-ups are still as gargantuan and all-encompassing as they were before, but Slow Focus gives listeners much more of a reason to pay close attention to the big riffs and subtle details that pave the way for the journey rather than just setting sights for the climax at the end.
The enduring quality of Fuck Buttons work lies in their finely tuned awareness of one another, which is what makes their third album Slow Focus a towering achievement.
A fearsome, mind-bending collection.
There is crystalline beauty on offer here as well as thunking great passages of dirty, nasty noise and it is this rise and fall which makes it a) so compelling and b) best listened to in one go, all the way through, with no breaks.
With each album, Power and Hung have taken Fuck Buttons in many more directions post-Street Horrrsing than could have been imagined, and Slow Focus delivers some of their most masterful and seemingly effortless music yet.
There are differences and points of progression—a more foreboding atmosphere, a broader palette of sounds and instrumentation—that prevent it from feeling like a retread.
It doesn’t feel like they’ve deepened or anything; if anything the duo continues to forge toward the middle.
Slow Focus is exactly what you'd expect from a Fuck Buttons effort: it's brusque, overwhelming and complicated. But for a band so intent on pushing boundaries, this is a strange, almost faltering, sidestep.
Slow Focus leaves your mind numb from the excess.
Fuck Buttons #3: Elegancia, recuerdo, nostalgia, arrogancia, y muerte. 7:30 P.M:
Un final magnifico, una prueba de que este dúo no se detenía ni bajaba, solo mejoraba y no paraba, se superaban a ellos mismos.
Slow Focus ve al dúo de electrónica experimental, glitch, neo psicodelia, y drone, de una forma muchísimo más elegante, más impactante, más ardua y profunda, estás dentro de un tipo de mafia luego de conseguir la victoria, y ... read more
Did not think I'd be all that into this. Totally into this. Realllly questioning why I never gave Tarot Sport a fair chance.
This is one of the most compulsively listenable albums of the year for me, and I'll be real surprised if it doesn't end up in my top 10.
Fuck Buttons #3: Elegancia, recuerdo, nostalgia, arrogancia, y muerte. 7:30 P.M:
Un final magnifico, una prueba de que este dúo no se detenía ni bajaba, solo mejoraba y no paraba, se superaban a ellos mismos.
Slow Focus ve al dúo de electrónica experimental, glitch, neo psicodelia, y drone, de una forma muchísimo más elegante, más impactante, más ardua y profunda, estás dentro de un tipo de mafia luego de conseguir la victoria, y ... read more
1 | Brainfreeze 8:33 | 92 |
2 | Year of the Dog 4:38 | 84 |
3 | The Red Wing 7:48 | 90 |
4 | Sentients 6:24 | 92 |
5 | Prince's Prize 4:22 | 91 |
6 | Stalker 10:08 | 89 |
7 | Hidden Xs 10:12 | 90 |
#9 | / | Bleep |
#12 | / | A.V. Club |
#13 | / | Drowned in Sound |
#19 | / | Clash |
#19 | / | Slant |
#23 | / | eMusic |
#30 | / | Time Out London |
#34 | / | Rough Trade |
#36 | / | musicOMH |
#40 | / | NME |