As he prepared to close his first decade of making music, Anthony Naples reached an impasse. Having established his club bona fides with a growing catalog of tough, distorted house and techno, the New York producer had indulged his appetite for ambient with 2018’s Take Me With You; then, the following year, he answered the atmospheric zig with a floor-friendly zag, Fog FM, that returned him to his body-moving wheelhouse. But the closure of nightclubs in 2020 gave Naples time to think; he suspected Fog FM had been too “obvious.” In retrospect, he said, “I was afraid to make the music I’m making now.” So with 2021’s Chameleon, he took a hard left once again, this time into an unusual fusion of post-punk and downtempo that was some of the most beguiling music of his career.
Where Naples used to be a dance producer who occasionally dipped into home-listening fare, he has increasingly come to look like a downbeat maven with a side hustle in rugged club jams. On Orbs, his first album in nearly two years, he continues to keep dance music at arm’s length. Orbs shares Chameleon’s measured tempos and wistful air. It also shares that album’s hybrid instrumentation, mixing electric guitar, bass, and acoustic drums into a dreamy, ethereal sound that weaves between ambient and post-rock. But the new record is smoother and lusher than its predecessor. And where Chameleon often felt guarded, Orbs glows with newfound confidence.
Naples once wondered if people might think an uncharacteristically colorful set of chord changes was “cheesy,” and on Orbs, he leans into ’90s chillout—a sound also tinged with the faintest hint of uncoolness. The slow-motion dub groove and woozy pads of the opening “Moto Verse” call back to the Mo Wax label’s Headz 2, a pair of 1996 compilations that mapped the era’s downtempo landscape. “Orb Two” goes further, sinking into shimmering pads and a lite-funk bassline that wouldn’t be out of place on Kruder & Dorfmeister’s dorm room make-out staple The K&D Sessions. (Or, more generously, Air’s timeless Moon Safari.) A low-key trip-hop revival has been bubbling away for a while now, but what’s surprising about Orbs is how unabashedly frictionless, even frothy, it can be—particularly coming from a guy who used to pile on the distortion and tape compression. By rescuing outmoded sounds, Naples provides a buoyant counterbalance to underground electronic music’s self-conscious darkness.
He eases into a more customary set of reference points on the album’s back half, where featherweight, slow-motion dub techno comes to the fore. The vibes are wispy, but the emotions cut deep. There’s hardly anything to “Ackee,” at least on paper—just a languid descending bassline answered by twinkling chords, all of it wrapped in a gentle fog. But there are things happening out of earshot: shimmering chimes and scraps of melodica, and imperceptible micro-rhythms that flutter around the stolid, four-on-the-floor kick. “Scars” and “Strobe” offer similarly enigmatic takes on ambient techno, and with the closing “Unknow,” Naples swirls together all the album’s influences—and a few more—into one of the most bewitching songs he’s ever made.
The gloomy electric bass and backmasked pads fall halfway between DJ Shadow and the Cure; soft tendrils of clean-toned guitar have the warm, reassuring feel of the Durutti Column, yet the snare drum echoes like a gunshot across a frozen field. The net effect suggests something like Balearic goth—a weird amalgam that shouldn’t make sense, yet somehow does. As in the best of Naples’ work, it’s impossible to tease out the different strands; the emotional crux of “Unknow” is a subdued melodic riff that might be someone humming, or maybe a muted trumpet, or maybe both things digitally soldered together. Yet it’s not all so sweet: An abraded synth periodically cuts crosswise across the track, an intimation of ominous forces lurking in the wings. You can hear an echo of his corrosive club instincts gnawing away at the margins of this tranquil reverie. Naples once worried that he had let others’ expectations unconsciously guide his music-making into “obvious” places. “Unknow” is the gorgeous capstone on an album that demonstrates the singularity of his vision.
