He continues doing what he really wants, and with unquestionable mastery. “Three” (2024) is not the third, but a twelfth album (released on his own label) with which Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, highlights his mastery of textures, his ability to carve lush soundscapes, his role as a shaman in thoroughly massaging the senses. I don’t know to what extent his collaborations with Madlib, Skrillex and Fred Again… or his legal battle with the Domino label over streaming royalties in recent years have influenced this work, it is easy to fall into the temptation of relating them, but the truth is is that this sounds like what he has always done, and with the overwhelming versatility that is the trademark of the house.
It doesn’t matter that we delve into the hip hop rhythm of the early nineties, a kind of downtempo that sounds like a cross between DJ Shadow and J Dilla (“Loved”), that gets mired in a fractured dub (“Storm Crystal”), that appeals to ambient and the first chill, that of The KLF (“Gliding Through Everything”), that makes us dance to the rhythm of pinion house (“Daydream Repeat”) or minimal techno (“31 Bloom”), that makes us immerse yourself in the balsamic properties of his folktronica (“Skater”) or directly make us fly with a “Three Drums” whose closing eight minutes I do not have the rennet to define other than as pure magic: at this moment, more than two million and seven hundred thousand people must think the same, based on their plays on Spotify. There is always a differential point, a share of indecipherable mystery, a tingling in the stomach. More than twenty years after “Rounds” (2003), I no longer know if this is a new peak or just another shiny new day at the office. Tremendous.