Living With Ghosts

Aside from the noisy (“Mirror”) and numb (“Aokigahara”) bookends that signal its battery-ram beginnings and valley-dredging denouement, Sigha’s debut album feels like a night that’ll never end. It's a one-way trip down a tunnel full of tectonic techno. It’s never exhausting, though; thanks to brief ambient breaks like “Suspension” and “Delicate” and the pulse-flattening outro of “She Kills in Ecstasy,” Living with Ghosts balances its pressure-cooked peaks (“Translate” builds and builds until it’s about to explode) with enough peaceful lulls to keep Sigha’s blackhole beats from blurring. Hi-fi, hypnotic, and oppressively heavy, his metallic hooks create a wormhole worth exploring, so long as you don’t mind keeping up with a revolving door of controlled chaos for more than an hour. Absolutely essential if you’re into the darker turn that U.K. techno has taken in the past few years.