Floating Points - "Key103"

Floating Points has announced his first solo record in five years and shared the new single, "Key103."

It's hard to believe that the last solo album from Sam Shepherd under his Floating Points moniker was 2019's excellent Crush. Since then, he released the phenomenal record Promises with the late, great Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, dropped some stellar (until now) one-off singles, and has been playing tons of shows with his buddies Four Tet, Caribou, Skrillex, and more. He's also done the score to a film. Now he's back with a new album all his own, Cascade, and it features the new track "Key103." This is a classic sounding Floating Points song with hard beats and twitching rhythms that throb with persistent pulse before they climax and drop into sensational grooves. It's heady club music that was inspired by classic rave music and underground British radio that Shepherd listened to in his youth. In a statement about the album, he said:

There's something about Manchester that keeps coming back to me, and I think it's partly to do with its record shops. As a kid, my school was around the corner from the Northern Quarter so at lunchtimes, I'd run out of the school gates and skip lunch altogether to go and listen to records. I'm sure I was a total pain in the arse constantly pulling records off the shelves, but it was amazing. I'd be listening to Autechre at Pelican Neck, Dilla at Fat City, David Morales mixes at the Factory Records shop… It gave me a parallel education in music to what I was being taught at school.

Well, it sounds like skipping lunch to hear Autechre and Dilla certainly paid off.

Cascade is out September 13 via Ninja Tune.