What does Radical Frame actually sound like?
Actress has never made comfortable records, and his latest for Ninja Tune doesn't start now. Across eight tracks, Darren Cunningham collages techno, grime, contemporary classical and avant-garde noise, letting house pulses and drum & bass skitter surface then dissolve into ambient smear. DJ Mag handed the record a "Masterpiece" rating, calling it "possibly the clearest expression of his aesthetic yet," and pointed back to 2010's Splazsh, the album that first drew comparisons to Burial's rainswept London, as the closest reference point in his own catalogue.
CASISDEAD turns up on "Live By You," Naomi Kimpenu lends her voice elsewhere, and the whole thing ships in a screenprinted PVC sleeve, the kind of packaging detail that signals Cunningham still treats the album as an object, not a playlist filler.
Why is the 16-minute closer the story?
"Sheets," featuring Rainy Miller, closes the record at 16 minutes and 24 seconds and is the track every early review keeps circling back to. DJ Mag called it "one of the most astonishing pieces of electronic music we've heard in years," a claim that's hard to make about a closer on a dance label without inviting scepticism, and one the outlet backed with its top rating for the album as a whole. It's built to be the argument for the record, not a fade-out.
How does this fit Actress's arc since Hazyville?
Radical Frame is Cunningham's 11th album, and Ninja Tune frames it plainly: it "arrives 18 years since debut album Hazyville, and it feels like an apotheosis." That's not the "first album in decades" story some outlets will be tempted to tell, since Cunningham has released steadily through that span, including AZD for Ninja Tune in 2017. What's new here is the fidelity. Where early Actress records buried melody under tape hiss and deliberate murk, DJ Mag hears "newfound clarity," the same ideas rendered in sharper focus rather than reinvented from scratch.
