Lone has released Hyperphantasia, his first album in five years and arguably his most ambitious to date, out now via his longtime home Greco-Roman.
The record spans 16 tracks and covers an extraordinary amount of ground. Matt Cutler, the Nottingham-born producer behind the Lone alias, has spent nearly two decades building a catalogue that moves restlessly between sounds: early records drew on Detroit techno and kosmische influences, while albums like Galaxy Garden (2012) and Levitate (2019) brought him closer to UK rave traditions and beatmaker culture. Hyperphantasia pulls all of it into one place at once, fusing skippy 2-step, hyper-pop, ravey breaks, and a strain of synthetic melody that has always been Cutler’s most distinctive quality.
The album opens with the neon-tinted ‘Life Spark’ and closes with the rave-centred ‘Ascension.png’, with guests including Lou Hayter (formerly of New Young Pony Club and a consistent presence in UK electronic circles) and Ell Murphy across its runtime. Neither guest overpowers the record’s central voice: this is, above all, a producer’s album, one that uses collaboration as texture rather than direction.
Cutler has described the record in characteristically direct terms, calling it “unhinged, unrestrained, self-indulgent bat-shit pop music from an alternate dimension”, and adding that it feels like taking every style he has previously worked with, amplifying each to the maximum, and releasing them all at once. It is a fair summary. Hyperphantasia does not feel like a record made with one ear on restraint, and that is precisely what makes it interesting.
The album is out now across all platforms.
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