Album review: Royksopp – Senior

For a good decade now, Svein Berge and Torbjorn Brundtland – the Norwegian duo behind Royksopp – have made a series of records that would be best described as thinking man’s dance.

Their music has a trippy, dreamy quality that relies on killer hooks, rather than the mind-numbing repetition that turns many off to electronica.

Last year’s Junior, a high watermark for the group, cut through thanks to some top-shelf pop songs and a stellar line-up of guest vocalists: The Knife’s Karin Dreijer-Andersson gets tricky on our asses on Tricky Tricky, Lykke Li gets breathless on Miss It So Much and Swedish dancehall queen Robyn duets with a robot!

Now comes Senior, the atmospheric late-night companion to Junior, a set of nine downbeat, instrumental dance meditations.

Where Junior was sunny and ostentatious, Senior is dark and introverted.

On first listen, Senior is a disappointment compared to Junior because it lacks the hooks and sense of fun that made that album so memorable. But if you sit back and let the keyboards, subtle beats and lashings of delay wash over you, there’s plenty to enjoy on Senior.

There’s the surprisingly chipper The Alcoholic, the wild west acoustic guitar of Forsaken Cowboy, the gentle, reassuring Rhodes on Coming Home and the creepy, Lynchian-feel of the untitled secret track.

Senior also reimagines some of Junior’s memorable moments. Tricky Two (Karin Dreijer-Andersson sadly absent) is a beats to the fore reworking, while The Fear recreates the feel of the string laiden instrumental Royksopp Forever.

What we’re left with is an uneasy double: Junior/Senior (thankfully not a reference to the Danish duo who gave us Move Your Feet – remember the eight-bit clip with the squirrel in it?).

The mistake with this twin albums approach is that Senior can never be judged on its own merits. Like Kid A and Amnesiac before it, Junior and Senior are destined to be forever spoken of in the same breath, which is of detriment to both albums.

But if you can manage to divorce one album from the other, the carefully created ambience and atmosphere of Senior manages to stand on its own.

One track blurs into the next, but that’s exactly how Royksopp wants it: “Each track is equally as important as its predecessor and successor. We feel that none of the tracks should be regarded outside of this context,” they say on their website. And this is how the album works best. Sit back with a glass of something, late at night, and let it envelope you.