Never The Right Time

Double vinyl LP pressing. It's been a decade since Andy Stott released Passed Me By, a radical re-imagining of dance music as an expression of "physical and spiritual exhaustion" (Pitchfork). What followed was a process of rapid remodelling: We Stay Together (2011 / slow and f*cked, for the club), Luxury Problems (2012 / greyscale romance), Faith In Strangers (2014/ destroyed love songs), Too Many Voices (2016 / 4th world Triton shimmers) and It Should Be Us (2019 / the club, collapsed) - a run of releases that gradually untangled complex ideas into a singular, chaotic body of work - somewhere between sound-art, techno and pop. Echoing that mix of new and old, each of the songs on Never The Right Time is woven from the same thread despite following different trajectories; from the lovelorn shimmer of opener 'Away not gone', to the clattering linndrum pop of 'The beginning', through 'Answers' angular club haze, and the city-at-night end-credits 'Hard to Tell'. These are songs fuelled by nostalgia and soul searching, but all hold true to a vision of music making as a form of renewal and reinvention. A 10 year cycle, complete.