Young Hunting – Attachment in a Child and the Subsequent Condition

If, as some suggest, the very idea of the album is currently facing an existential threat, nobody told Edinburgh’s Young Hunting. Attachment in a Child and the Subsequent Condition is as audacious an attempt to defend the format imaginable, a sprawling concept-driven industrial-ambient opus. Taking psychoanalytic theories of child development as their central theme, Young Hunting incorporate field recordings and effects loops into an ultimately song-centred sensibility, although ‘song’ is an elastic concept here.

Structures are characterised by multiple gradual shifts: from stuttering electronics, through Coil-style thudding beats and groaning bass, to melt into blurred shoegaze noise or sombre synth chords. Spoken-word vocals hold the shifting morass together. This approach proves effective in conjuring an alien intensity, albeit one difficult to sustain over sixteen tracks: Attachment...’s grandiose ambition means it can, at times, feel less like a defence of the album format than an illustration of why it is currently being challenged. [Sam Wiseman]