For Röyksopp, the end was contained in the beginning. Though the Norwegian duo aren't calling it quits, Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge have billed their new album as their last in the "traditional album format." Still, the downtempo house of Röyksopp's slickly pleasurable 2001 debut, Melody A.M., with its countless licensing opportunities and compilation appearances, already foreshadowed the post-album era. Across subsequent releases, Röyksopp have evolved with the rest of Scandinavian electronic pop, but overall their best work has tended to be other than LP length, whether a remix for the Streets, a remix by Trentemøller, or a robot-romancing Robyn team-up.
Röyksopp's opulent, exploratory mini-album with Robyn earlier this year represented a possible way forward; by dropping the Swedish pop singer's singularly expressive vocals into a mixture of radio-ready directness and silky, groove-chasing breadth, Do It Again achieved a 35-minute whole just about equal to the sum of its parts. The Inevitable End, on the other hand, is a reminder of why the album is commercially moribund for the vast majority of artists in the first place. Despite capable guest vocalists, including Robyn herself, it's generally devoted to glossy, bittersweet electronic drifts that are too slow, too long, or too bland to hold interest for 60 minutes, though often unobjectionable in smaller servings. This, too, is a post-album album.
As such, The Inevitable End easily lends itself to other types of listening experiences. With a baleful filter-disco gallop and vocoderized call to "ride with us tonight," Daft Punk-like opener "Skulls" could, given the right speakers and onstage visuals, serve as a striking kickoff for a live set. The chiming, midtempo melancholia of "Sordid Affair", with a tender, electronics-kissed lead vocal by Ryan James, of Welsh duo Man Without Country, would neatly set a mood for a commercial, film, or TV show; for some reason I imagine it playing on an airplane as the passengers board. It should be added that Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanne Sundfør—who appeared on another disappointing 2014 album by a Robyn collaborator, Kleerup's As If We Never Won—acquits herself well enough again here, lending crystalline grace to the percolating "Save Me" and (especially) the credits-ready beat ballad "Running to the Sea", which dates back to 2012.
However, Röyksopp have said The Inevitable End is "headphones music" for "home listening," and with apologies to Brundtland and Berge, I must report that repeated, attentive listens at home, on headphones, have been at times all but maddening for me. Jamie McDermott of London's the Irrepressibles has a creamy, mannered voice that could lock down a concise dance-pop song by, say, Disclosure, but on each of his four guest appearances here, he's stuck intoning uncatchy magnetic poetry atop lugubrious, slow-motion expanses. He has to go and there's nothing left to say, he says more than once; his guilt is "just like a razor to my soul." As for the lover he hurt, the "rain" in her sorrowful mind falls mainly where it rhymes with "sane." Though the repetitive pulse of "Compulsion" convincingly evokes a monomaniacal desire for a place with "no anxiety or fear," it's as numbing as that sounds.
Robyn embodies both how The Inevitable End went off track and how it still goes right. On "Rong", a glacial synth arpeggio takes on an orchestral glaze; she does nothing but repeatedly ask, "What the fuck is wrong with you?," which could work but here comes off as no better than B-side material compared with her 2010 album Body Talk's Röyksopp-produced "None of Dem". The LP standout is a punched-up, streamlined rework of Do It Again's "Monument", a song that despite its monolithic theme actually demonstrates how all human accomplishment eventually crumbles into history. Also remixed recently to excellent effect by Kindness, it's a monument that exists without a single definitive version. That might've been an intriguing conceptual starting point for an album. What if The Inevitable End had been, instead of a form of closure, a new opening—a rebirth or reinvention? All good things must come to a smell ya later, sure, but Röyksopp didn't have to leave it quite like this.
