There is a blurriness to electronic duo Animal Hack’s new album Gift that helps it stand out a bit from other artists in the same zone as them. Their latest release features plenty of hallmarks of contemporary electronic music in Japan — see the big release of opener “Body,” the breezy portions of “Plastic Night” — but the edge feature something a bit more disorienting, a bit more deep-into-the-night-with-no-sleep. Animal Hack’s approach to playing around with vocal samples drives this feeling the most, as numbers such as “Letter” find voices smeared into one another, giving the song a disorienting atmosphere. Same goes for “Inside,” which sounds vaguely familiar (the sample is dancing on my mind, what is it!?) but gets tweaked enough to turn woozy. Best of all is “WIMM?,” a soft number interrupted by these jarring crashes and screams — it’s less about tension and more about just letting sound rip a song apart. Listen above.
