Lust for Youth were never quite as frigid as they seemed. Even on 2012’s Growing Seeds, the minimalist, abrasive solo debut of Swedish producer Hannes Norrvide, a song like “Champagne” yearned to pop a cork and hit the dancefloor. And by the time the coldwave revival began to thaw, Norrvide’s project had expanded twice—first into a duo with Malthe Fischer, then a trio, bringing in Posh Isolation label co-founder Loke Rahbek—and begun to dip its toes into the warmer waters of beach disco and balearic pop. All Worlds, the group’s new full-length collaboration with Rahbek’s Croatian Amor moniker, finally commits to a decade-plus’ worth of flirtations: This is a summer record through and through, engineered for windows-down car rides along the coast, beachside cabana bars, and Ibiza discothèques. As soundtrack, mood music, vibe, All Worlds flourishes; under closer inspection, it can resemble a lesser sum of its references. Tantalizing but not always satisfying, the album summons a series of itches that the songs can’t quite scratch.
Rahbek departed Lust for Youth some time between 2016’s Compassion and 2019’s Depeche Mode-worshipping self-titled record, meaning the split-billed All Worlds doubles as a full-band reunion. After so much collaboration and mutual influence, it’s not always clear where Norrvide and Fischer’s work ends and Croatian Amor’s begins. All three are fond of widescreen, echoing guitars and driving lite-industrial rhythms, though 2013’s excellent Pomegranate, the last LP credited to both acts, forayed into new age-y ambiance. The new album doesn’t sound like Pomegranate; instead, it island hops from DJ Koze’s bucolic techno (“Kokiri”) to Air France’s seaside sampledelia (“Dummy”) to Jamie xx’s pirate radio two-step (“Fleece”). “Passerine” stands out as new territory for the trio—a Cocteau Twins rip so uncanny that you could layer in Elizabeth Fraser’s “Iceblink Luck” glossolalia practically unchanged. In stretching to encompass a universally sun-drenched ideal, All Worlds sometimes feels like a singles compilation instead of a unified statement.
This is, at least in part, by design. While making All Worlds, Norrvide, Fischer, and Rahbek drew inspiration from the Golden Record aboard the 1977 Voyager space probes, etched with photographs, multilingual greetings, and sounds of Earth ostensibly aimed at an extraterrestrial audience. What press materials describe as the trio’s attempt to capture a “kaleidoscopic view of the human experience” ends up like a veritable inkblot test for the last 20 years of indie dance. Tilt opening track “Friendzone” one way and catch the shearing synths that could’ve been lifted whole-cloth from Rustie’s Glass Swords; another and the hesitant, digitized vocal sample starts to sound like SOPHIE’s “Infatuation.” These phantoms crop up throughout, gestures at nostalgia that tend to come off a bit stock. The spoken first line of “Lights in the Center” (“Round rock… it’s where we’d hide and smoke cigarettes”) hints at youthful escapism à la M83, but the accompanying song—a water balloon of beatific, aimless noise that keeps filling up until it spontaneously deflates—doesn’t know how to deliver on them.
Summer is a season of extremes—exhilaration and malaise, heat that can feel more oppressive than the cold—and All Worlds is best when it leans into them. “Nowhere” is a delicately ambling ballad that pitches snippets of a male speaker (3NDLES5’s Mitch Tolman) against tender R&B runs courtesy of Australian musician YL Hooi. Suddenly there’s context and tension behind the album’s dislocated narrators, and when the beat finally kicks in with just over a minute left, a real sense of liftoff. The churning blend of dream pop and dubstep on “Akkadian” and album closer “Still Here” shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does; the back half of “Kokiri” injects an undemanding lo-fi shuffle with trance euphoria. In light of the news that Posh Isolation will shutter this year, the album’s “name that tune” tendencies feel almost triumphant—a tribute to microgenres and musical trends gone by since the label’s founding in 2009. At the very least, All Worlds achieves this much: Few records are better equipped to instruct an alien lifeform in summertime’s fleeting joys and exquisite sadness.
