Immunity

hey y'all, Hypercollider here, and what is a radiohead can someone tell me please

Today's album is Jon Hopkins' Immunity, released on the 3rd of June 2013 under the Domino label.
The album is 8 tracks, just over an hour long, and amazing all the way through the end.

Now, let's go TBT (which is a fun new casual way to say track by track that is in with the youth):

We Disappear starts with a sample of someone entering a building, while the actual song fades in, which i think symbolizes Jon entering the studio.
The song is an amazing microhouse track, with a slow droning melody, an overdrived bass line and various distorted bleeps and sounds making up the drums. The song never feels boring because of the plethora of sounds that come in and out.
Around 3:30 minutes the song gets chopped and screwed, the drums leave and what remains is the melody, which now reveals itself to be full of textures and atmospheres.

We Disappear fades into Open Eye Signal, which starts with some reverberated sine waves that slowly fade out while the drums and bass fade in. The bass is super deep and choppy and the drums are really interesting because they sound like a mix of acoustic and electronic drums. Some chords drone out in the background and then a pad swoops on the forefront of the track, giving it a spacey vibe. As the song builds up, the filter on the bass opens up, revealing a new choppy synth line. The pads that have been expanding during the track fade out around the six minute mark, where the song switches to just kick, hat, a distorted bass and some background textures, until the song implodes on itself, fading into Breathe This Air.

The song starts with some reversed textures and a quiet pad, which give a relaxing vibe. Out of nowhere, the track punches you in the face with a deep kick and that's where everything else starts to fade in. The pad from the beginning starts to get chopped up, the rest of the drums come in and it all amps up right until about 1:20 where all that remains is just a piano that sounds like it's being recorded from the other side of the room. Eventually the drums and background textures fade back in until we're left with an UK Garage beat that almost reminds me of Burial's less sample-heavy work.

Collider kicks in with some weird distorted clicks that sound like some drums you'd find in an old screwed up cassette tape. After that the song dives you head first into an unnerving dance beat, with groovy drums, dissonant pads and the first vocal samples in the album.
The song builds up, adding some metallic plucks, some more drum samples and some echoey vocals that almost serve as another pad. Around the 5 minute mark the vocals become more distinct and less reverberated but are still mainly unintelligible due to the heavy sidechaining on the track. On the 6:20 mark, the low end fades out as more and more pads stack up on each other, until we get greeted with my favorite drop in the entire album. This song, even with it's 9 minute run-time, still doesn't feel too long or boring, mantaining my attention throughout the entirety of it.

Abandon Window mainly consists of just a recording of a piano, but i think the focal point of it, more than the piano itself, which still sounds fantastic, is actually the atmosphere around the piano: the wind blowing through the leaves of the trees, the creaking chair Jon is sitting in, the keys hitting the strings of the piano, the faint chirping noises, that's what makes that recording so full of emotion and so special. A low, rumbling but still quaint sound helps fill out some of the low end on the track. As the song progresses, the piano gets more and more echoed and distant, as more and more textures and pads fill in the space where the piano was, and as i listen to this song, walking around my city, while the sunlight is slowly cascading and bringing forth the night, i can't help but stop, look around, and admire the nature, the grass, the trees, the sky, the clouds, the world I'm around, and just be grateful for all of it. This is such an emotional track, full of wonder and lush soundscapes. It is my favorite track on the entire album.

Form By Firelight starts off with a droning pad and some off-kilter beats, which then get resolved a couple bars after when the hi-hat comes in and reveals the actual groove in the song. Some repeating piano notes flesh out the melody, and then the song switches to the starting drum beat, with the piano going in tandem with the kick and getting progressively choppier. We go back to the section from before, until the drums suddenly stop and all we're left with is a chopped piano line, a pad and the bass.

While the pad rings on in the background, a slice of it gets looped, and gradually gets higher in the mix until the song fades into Sun Harmonics, the longest song on the album.
The track immediately starts with some metallic drums that sound like someone dangling some keys in front of you. Some plucky chords enter, adding a nice bounce and vocal harmonies fade in, droning in the background.
Eventually the drums and bass kick in and
The bouncy chords get replaced with a muffled piano sound. Over time the song mellows out until it transforms into a full-blown ambient piece at about the 8 minute mark.

Immunity, the final track, starts with a reversed loop of a piano, which is the base on which multiple other piano loops stack up, some simple, others chopped up. The drums in the intro are pretty much just different foley samples programmed into a beat. Over time, these samples get overlapped with other more electronic drum samples. Around the 4 minute mark we get the first and only feature on the album, King Creosote on vocals. a
At the 6 minute mark the track strips back down to just piano and drums, with the occasional vocals in the background. Then, a synth bass fades in, droning a single note which then pitches down and fluctuates in various ways while in the background we hear some vocal harmonies. Finally, the last minute concludes the album with a melancholic piano and some muffled vocals, slowly fading out into silence.

This album is phenomenal.
It's both laid back and energetic, it feels like it could work in a rave or by yourself, at home, with your headphones on.

I give this album a 98/100.