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**Darkside - Spiral ★★★★☆**

There's something deliciously perverse about Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington calling their collaborative project Darkside, as if they're teenage metalheads spray-painting band names on garage doors. Yet the moniker proves oddly prescient for this duo's second full-length offering, a record that finds them descending ever deeper into the shadowy recesses of electronic music's most beguiling corners.

The genesis of *Spiral* stretches back nearly a decade to when these two restless experimenters first crossed paths in the fertile creative ecosystem surrounding Jaar's Other People imprint. Their 2013 debut *Psychic* established the template: Harrington's spectral guitar work threading through Jaar's labyrinthine production like smoke through a haunted house. But where that record occasionally felt like an extended jam session blessed by the gods of reverb, *Spiral* arrives with the weight of intention, each track carved from stone rather than conjured from air.

The album opens with "Narrow Road," a slow-burning meditation that immediately establishes the record's hypnotic pull. Harrington's guitar emerges from the primordial soup of Jaar's electronics like some ancient creature surfacing from deep water, all tremolo and delay-soaked longing. It's ambient music with teeth, setting the stage for an hour-long journey through landscapes both familiar and utterly alien.

What makes *Spiral* so compelling is how it operates in the spaces between genres, refusing easy categorisation while drawing from a vast wellspring of influences. There's dub techno's patient pulse, krautrock's motorik drive, and the ethereal drift of ambient music, but also something more primal – the sound of two musicians pushing each other toward unexplored territory. "The Limit" exemplifies this approach, building from whispered beginnings to a climax that feels both inevitable and surprising, like watching storm clouds gather in fast-forward.

The album's centrepiece, "Spiral," unfolds over nearly eight minutes of gradually shifting textures. Jaar's production work here is nothing short of masterful, creating a sonic environment so immersive you can practically feel the humidity. Harrington's guitar doesn't so much play melodies as suggest them, his notes hanging in the air like heat haze. It's the kind of track that reveals new details with each listen, a musical Magic Eye painting that rewards patience and attention.

"Liberty Bell" finds the duo at their most rhythmically adventurous, with Jaar's beats skittering and stuttering while Harrington's guitar provides an anchor in the storm. The interplay between organic and electronic elements reaches its apotheosis here, creating something that sounds simultaneously ancient and futuristic. Meanwhile, "Lawmaker" strips things back to their essence – a simple guitar figure repeated and transformed through Jaar's sonic prism until it becomes something entirely other.

The album's final act sees Darkside pushing into even more abstract territory. "Only Young" drifts by like a half-remembered dream, all ghostly vocals and subliminal rhythms, while closer "Hearts" provides a surprisingly tender conclusion to the journey. It's here that the duo's chemistry becomes most apparent – the way Harrington's melodic sensibilities balance Jaar's more cerebral tendencies, creating music that engages both head and heart.

*Spiral* arrives at a moment when electronic music often feels trapped between algorithmic predictability and attention-seeking maximalism. Darkside offer a third path, one that prizes atmosphere over impact and suggestion over statement. This isn't music for the main stage; it's for 3am drives through empty cities, for moments when you need to disappear into sound rather than be assaulted by it.

The album's influence can already be felt rippling through the underground, inspiring a new generation of producers to embrace space and silence as compositional tools. In an era of endless stimulation, *Spiral* makes a compelling case for the power of restraint, proving that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is simply slow down and listen.

Darkside have created something rare here – a record that functions as both a complete artistic statement and a collection of individual moments worth revisiting. *Spiral* confirms that the duo's partnership remains one of electronic music's most fruitful, a collaboration that continues to yield dividends nearly a decade after it began. In a world full of noise, they've mastered the art of meaningful silence.