Five years is a long time to keep the faithful waiting. Andy Stott has done exactly that, and if the lead single from Late Loop is anything to go by, every bit of the patience was worth it. The Manchester producer's last album, Never The Right Time, landed in 2021. The follow-up arrives 30th October on Modern Love, and the story of how it was made is almost as interesting as the music itself. ## No Bass. No Reverb. No Excuses. Stott gave himself a genuinely severe set of constraints going into Late Loop: no basslines, no reverb, no effects beyond a single delay unit. Strip away the tools that defined your sound and see what's left. That's either the mark of a producer with serious confidence in his own instincts, or someone who needed to burn the house down to build something new. Possibly both. The stated goal was to come out the other side with songs rather than textures, a meaningful distinction for an artist whose work has always lived in the atmospheric end of the pool. To make that happen, every track on the album features one of two vocalists: longtime collaborator Alison Skidmore, or new addition Elaine Howley. No instrumental tracks, no hedging. Each song belongs to one of them. That's a bold structural decision, and it shapes the whole eight-track record. The tracklist runs like this: Skidmore opens on "Cold Welcome", Howley steps in for "Something In Mind", and they alternate throughout before Skidmore closes things out on the title track. It's a proper, considered piece of sequencing, something you don't always get in electronic music, where albums can feel like playlists wearing a trench coat. ## "Something In Mind" Does the Talking The first track out in the world is "Something In Mind", featuring Howley, and it earns its place as the lead. The sound sits somewhere in foggy trip-hop and downtempo territory, but the structure is unambiguous, this is a song in the traditional sense, with shape and intention. Kitty Handley directed the accompanying video. It works. Whether the self-imposed restrictions freed Stott up or simply forced the issue is a question only he can answer. What the track suggests, though, is that trading reverb for discipline paid off. There's space in it, deliberate, controlled space, rather than the cavernous atmospherics you might expect. For anyone who's been watching the broader world of adventurous electronic music, we covered [a week at MUTEK](/uprise/music/a-week-at-mutek-made-montreal-feel-too-good-to) earlier this year, which put plenty of similar artists under the spotlight, the appetite for music that takes genuine risks with form is real and growing. Late Loop looks like it belongs in that conversation. ## Our Verdict Andy Stott set himself an almost perverse creative challenge and, from what we've heard, came through it with something that sounds nothing like a compromise. Eight tracks, two singers, one delay unit. Late Loop is out 30th October on Modern Love. Pre-order it. Then actually listen to it properly.