You wouldn’t know it from her fragmented crushes of electronic sound, but Loraine James’s musical journey began with an unexpected choice: 2000s emo band Death Cab for Cutie. Then came the diverse tastes of her mum, who played anything from calypso to heavy metal in the Enfield tower block where James grew up, and where she also came out in her teens. The brightly hued Alma Road Estate appeared on the cover of her 2019 debut, For You and I, both a tender memory of her childhood and a chilling reminder of inner-city gentrification.
James’s work has been described as “fearlessly queer” but, if anything, its defining quality is its unwillingness to sit still: time signatures are out the window and rushes of beats twitch and glitch around each other like free jazz. Her productions are deeply textural, thuds of drum punching through the dense, deconstructed thickets that incorporate IDM, grime, broken beat, jungle and beyond. Often her songs also have a gentle, dream-like quality, marking James out as a Squarepusher for the xx generation, perhaps.
So far she has released music to great acclaim from the left field, but the momentum has ramped up despite the pandemic. A flurry of self-released tracks on Bandcamp last year culminated in 2020’s Nothing EP, a flash of anxious euphoria with guest vocalists from Iran, Uruguay and Australia. And now, there’s a new album, Reflection, which encompasses watery dancehall (Insecure Behaviour and Fuckery), R&B (Running Like That) and icy rap (Black Ting, featuring another one-to-watch, Le3 bLACK), with a host of exciting guest features including another of her childhood heroes: LA’s Baths.
Reflection is out now on Hyperdub
