With “True Electric”, the Röyksopp returns in 2025 by claiming their space in the cartography of contemporary electronics.
Svein Berge and Torbjørn Bruntland return to pulsating in high frequency, offering an expanded compendium of their homonymous tour: a live similar consisting of 19 tracks that reread their twenty -year trajectory in a performative key, between remix, re -elaborations and unpublished.
The disc presents itself as a declaration of intent: a return “to the roots”, as they say themselves, or to that pure electronic matrix and club-oriented who has marked their aesthetic since the beginning. Yet, precisely in this return to the origins there is the ambiguity of the operation.
If on the one hand the album offers moments of indisputable emotional tension – above all the renewed What Else is there? With Fever Ray, who acquires an almost liturgical vein in his hypnotic incede – on the other he does not always manage to escape the trap of self -referentiality.
The sound of True Electric is crystal clear, smooth, of impeccable elegance. But this same perfection risks at times to cool listening, as if the ethereal had definitively taken over the carnal. The interaction between voice and synthetic texture, so central in songs like Do It Again with Robyn or Running to the Sea with Susanne Sundfør, remains effective but predictable, without that dizzying momentum that would be expected from two sound alchemists of this caliber.
To emerge is an electronics that looks in the mirror, pleased with one's shape but less inclined to risk. The repetition of rarefied and dilated sound structures, albeit with refined timbre variations, leads the album to a stylistic comfort area that fascinates but is not surprising. There is no lack of beauty, but it is an already known, familiar, almost ritual beauty.
True Electric is therefore a coherent, well -kept, at times enchanting work, which confirms the artisan ability of the Röyksopp in modeling enveloping sound landscapes.
But it is also an album that reveals the limits of an aesthetic that, in its refined mannerism, struggles to really renew itself. An exercise of style that makes us listen to the sound visions of the two.
To listen immediately
Unity (Ft. Karen Harding) – What Else is there? (Ft. Fever Ray) – Do it Again (Ft. Robyn)
To skip immediately
The project is monolithic. In its completeness are hours of music … all to dance!
