Jon Hopkins – RITUAL
While RITUAL possesses Jon Hopkins' trademark blend of dark vs light, it feels slight compared to his prior work
There was a point in the mid-2010s when London-based producer Jon Hopkins was arguably one of the most exciting electronic musicians in the world. Between his albums Immunity (2013) and Singularity (2018), Hopkins reached new levels of musical transcendence, mixing a thrilling combination of ambient, ethereal sounds with heavy beats and field recordings.
While his last effort, 2021's Music for Psychedelic Therapy, possessed all the characteristics of Hopkins' best work, its singular gimmick ran a little thin over its hour runtime, so on his latest album RITUAL, we get his most refined music yet. RITUAL is one continuous piece separated into eight chapters, clocking in at a lean 41 minutes, constantly ratching up the tension until the album's peak (part vi – solar goddess return), before simmering everything in the album's final two parts.
As the title suggests, the piece means to evoke the feelings of a ritual, though Hopkins has expressed this will differ for him and the listener. Still, the base reading is the ritual of composing. While RITUAL possesses Hopkins' trademark blend of dark vs light, it feels slight compared to his prior work, and so fails to reach his former glories.
Listen to: part ii – palace / illusion, part v – evocation, part vi – solar goddess return