RAP

RAP's spirited devil-may-care attitude has characterised their music since their self-titled debut back in 2015, and ties each vaporous moment on "Junction" together succinctly. A quick read of the accompanying press release leads to a garbled list of seemingly unrelated genres, but you don't have to listen for long for that all to make sense. "Junction" is an album that wails loudly about its London roots, and its patchwork of interconnected sounds is an earnest reflection of the location. When they veer from pacy, thudding broken techno on the titular opener into burned-out ferric halfstep on 'Cinel Moen' it makes perfect thematic sense, and the brittle, electrified folk-pop of 'Iris' is a surprisingly natural progression.

Gormley and Bush's sound isn't fixed to a genre, but it's fixed to its own smoky aesthetic. Taking cues from hypnagogic outsiders like Dean Blunt and Forest Swords, the duo harness a sound to tell a bleary-eyed story of a bleak British reality that's as emotionally charged as Hood and as dubbed-out and drizzly as Space Afrika. Moments like the beatless, MIDI orchestra led 'Coran' lend the album a healthy dose of stage smoke, and bizarre hybrid tracks like the acid-cum-emo 'Loose Connection' prove RAP can weld together seemingly conflicting sounds but absolite conviction.