Mura Masa: Curve 1 review – relentlessly above par

Producer Alex Crossan is both acclaimed and not feted enough. The Guernsey-born polymath won a Grammy for a 2018 Haim remix; recently, he collaborated with PinkPantheress on her hit Boy’s a Liar. But his own stuff is relentlessly above par.

Crossan’s fourth album finds him on his own label, Pond, and building a physical arts hub in Peckham, south London (also called Pond); he’s also putting out some of the most rhythmically inventive earworms of his career. A generous proportion of Curve 1’s tracklisting has already been released – tunes such as the nimble-footed Gimme, whose shapeshifting production invokes the rave era, or We Are Making Out, a slab of electroclash that features Singaporean artist Yeule declaiming about tongue tag on various modes of London Transport (“We are making out on the DLR”). Whenever I Want feels like an oblique anthem to freeing failure. “I’m allowed to fuck up whenever I want,” runs a vocal sample, the swish of drum’n’bass offset by a blithe keyboard line.

The remainder is hardly filler. Giddyp feels like early hyperpop, with Crossan playing with BPMs throughout (“Up! Down!”), while there’s some era-perfect two-step on Shuf (Adore U). Throughout, hard dancefloor action never comes at the expense of wistful, bittersweet feeling.