Dance music prides itself on big-tent inclusivity, but DJ culture thrives on jealously guarded secrets. In some ultra-competitive genres—Northern soul, hip-hop, jungle—selectors have been known to cover up the center stickers of their records, or leave white labels unmarked, to throw boothsnooping DJs off the scent. No artist has had more fun subverting the conventions of the track ID than Kieran Hebden, better known as Four Tet. Ten years ago, to celebrate reaching one million SoundCloud followers, he uploaded a fan favorite and gave it the self-explanatory title, “A Lost Track That I’ve Been Playing on the Radio and Stuff. Seemed Like a Nice Thing to Put Out There Because of Smashing it on the Internet Etc. Shout Out to Ben UFO and Anthony Naples. May 2016.” He’s taken things even further with his alias ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ, an unpronounceable glyph written in Wingdings that you might have to copy and paste.
The project was born from Hebden’s long-running Spotify playlist, which has swelled to more than 2,300 songs and 192 hours of music in its decade of existence, and whose title is also rendered in a perpetually changing string of Wingdings. Early on, Hebden was looking for a way of peppering his playlist with songs of his own that couldn’t be found anywhere else; the only workaround, Spotify reps told him, was to create hidden aliases that couldn’t be easily searched for, and his squiggly thicket of sigils was born.
Since 2017, Hebden has built up a tidy discography of sub rosa loosies and EPs under the alias, and even snuck out an ultra-limited vinyl anthology of them in 2021; some of those tracks first surfaced on the Four Tet album Parallel, in 2020. (Another alias, 00110100 01010100, yielded the albums 0181 and 871.) The project is no longer quite as secretive as it once was; many tracks have racked up millions of plays on Spotify, and searching for “Four Tet” on streaming services now also turns up a result for ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ, making navigation much easier. But his latest dispatch from the alias, an eight-track album with an unprintable title (literally: various glitches render it differently across different platforms), suggests that the increased sunlight has only invigorated the project.
There’s no real point trying to parse the differences between Hebden’s Four Tet and Wingdings aliases; the fact that so many Wingdings tracks turned up on Parallel proves that the border is porous. But compared to Four Tet’s largely downbeat 2024 album Three, the new record keeps the tempos brisk and the energy high. Half the tracks skate along atop grooves informed by house and UK garage, reflecting Hebden’s clubbiest inclinations as well as his idiosyncratic sound design. Take track five, which was released as a standalone in August 2022 and turned up in Fred again..’s Boiler Room set that year: The beat is crisp and skippy, the synth bass stonking, and carefully placed whorls of modular synth build to actual crowd-stoking drops. It’s a genuine anthem, the kind of track that defines contemporary UK house at its most crowd-pleasing. And thanks to a judiciously used vocal hook, “I’ve got feelings”—which intrepid sample spotters might recognize from Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U”—it’s the rare Wingdings cut that one could readily name and confirm to friends and fellow setlist sleuths.
Four other tracks have been plucked from previous ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ releases, including three from an EP released in October 2024. Track three scuttles atop a bed of pine needles and broken eggshells, a nervous, almost dubsteppy rhythm haloed in Four Tet’s characteristic bell tones. Track four rides along the kind of knotty beat you suspect Hebden could probably write in his sleep, but it still stands out as one of his best: The nimble hi-hat rhythm, interrupted by spring-reverb clang and bitcrushed accents, is unusually rich in texture, even by Four Tet’s tactile standards, while the wash of background synths evokes the legacy of ambient house at its dreamiest. Track six, on the other hand, recalls the plangent reveries of ’90s IDM artists like Arovane. The other holdover, track two, was released as a single in October 2025. The carefully syncopated house groove strikes the perfect balance between forward glide and garagey skippiness; harp synths spread out in fractals, enfolding the stereo field in a sparkling embrace. It sounds like the platonic ideal of a Four Tet song.
The three new tracks push in different directions, exploring various shades of ambient and downbeat. Track seven swathes a nervous dub rhythm in cottony pads and opulent harps; track eight takes us out on an uncharacteristically beatless swirl, like a tide pool full of sea anemones. But the most striking of the new songs is the opener, a slow-motion unfurling against a backdrop of heartbeats and zithers. The undulating synth lead seems tailored to mimic the tone and timbre of a classical Indian singer, a comparison borne out by the occasional flashes of vocal sample peeking through the mix. It’s Hebden’s most explicit engagement with Indian music since 2015’s hypnotic Morning/Evening, and a refreshingly novel twist on the kinds of modular synthesizer tones that have proliferated in recent years. When its sidewinding structure finally coalesces, bringing together various elements of his music into one satisfying whole—ambient scene-setting, sample trickery, analog sound sculpting, an effortlessly kinetic beat—it feels like the summation of decades of Hebden’s work. The secret’s out.
