Tirzah Mastin’s 2018 debut, Devotion, was a soft, strange, secret den, built from the bones of club music and R&B, co-written with the film composer and DIY noise-pop maverick Mica Levi. For the Essex songwriter’s second album, she keeps it close, working with Levi and vocalist Coby Sey, who also featured on Devotion. On Hive Mind, she and Sey trade intimacies over a spidery arpeggio, shuddering bass synth and minimal handclap, unruffled by the muffled, barked shouts that intermittently pierce their reverie, threatening its integrity.
Colourgrade is less structured even than the ramshackle Devotion, its beats erratic and organic, seemingly ready to fall out of time or apart altogether at a touch, Tirzah and Sey’s naked vocals dropping almost all artifice. They’re barely even singing, not really rapping on the likes of Tectonic, a moody, hypnotic track that’s like an eroded afterimage of Blue Lines-era Massive Attack, Tirzah’s sleepily playful delivery recalling her former collaborator Tricky.
On Beating, she casually clears her throat, adding to the song’s fuzzy, amniotic, bodily directness: “You got me, I got you/ We made life, it’s beating.” It’s definitely an album served best by headphones and solitude, and one that won’t draw you back as much as it draws you in; Crepuscular Rays, six and a half minutes of hazy, panning strums and soft burbling, is possibly an intimacy too far. But at its unpredictable, eclectic best, Colourgrade creates a quietly wondrous connection that’s tough to shake.
