Recorded in six weeks over summer 2024, largely in single takes, Nathan Fake’s seventh album is the sound of an artist who has stopped worrying about where his music is going and leaned into where it is now. A quiet satisfaction bubbles beneath the surface of Evaporator; it feels as if Fake has aged into happy maturity, 23 years after making his recorded debut. This is a record whose creator appears perfectly at ease with himself and his abilities—the polar opposite of the tired tortured-artist myth. It might be no coincidence that this is the first Nathan Fake record to bear his face on its cover. In his introductory notes to the album Fake talks about letting go of the shame he once felt at using old production software like Cubase VST5. “That’s just how I play,” he says, and you can almost see the shrug of the shoulders.
Evaporator is a shrug-of-the-shoulders kind of record in many ways. The sound is essentially conservative: a mixture of huge, amiably fuzzy synth melodies and rhythms that land somewhere between UK garage shuffle, IDM tricksiness, and the four-on-the-floor tick of techno. There’s nothing that engages with Afro house, hard techno, hyperpop, or any other mid-’20s dance-music trend. There’s (probably) nothing that will become a dancefloor hit; and if, say, the agreeably drifty “Aiwa” somehow ends up soundtracking a million TikTok videos, it almost certainly won’t be Fake’s doing.
We’ve definitely been here before: The “Fluffy Mix” of “Outhouse,” from Fake’s 2003 debut 12", could easily have fit onto Evaporator, as could the majority of his last record, 2023’s Crystal Vision. The arpeggiated riff and soaring synth rushes of “Hypercube,” meanwhile, evoke James Holden’s ultra-progressive house mix of Fake’s “The Sky Was Pink,” one of the most psychedelically charged dance tracks of the 2000s.
That this revivalism works is largely because what Fake does is so neuron-ticklingly satisfying that it threatens to give “pleasant” a good name. “Bialystock,” the album’s first single and best song, consists of little more than walls of quivering synths; what sounds like the drums from 2 in a Room’s “She’s Got Me Going Crazy” (as notably employed by Moby in “Go”); and enough echo to destroy a swimming pool. But the song seems to hit every pleasure center in the brain as it leisurely expands and contracts, reminding the listener that—obvious as it might seem—there is often little better in electronic music than hearing well-shaped sounds fade in and out of focus (see, notably, ’90s French house.)
Throughout the album, melody is king. “Bialystock” centers on a four-chord sequence that elicits as much comfort in feeling sad as any Smiths record, while “The Ice House” is built out of a keyboard riff so mystically inviting that Fake couldn’t bring himself to stop playing it. That melodic emphasis is a powerful remedy for Evaporator’s limited and occasionally even formulaic sound. “Black Drift (Outro)” and “Yucon” are so reminiscent of Boards of Canada’s ’90s output in their dusky, soft-focus synths that you half expect them to abscond to the Scottish hills under mysterious circumstances—but they convey enough wistful melancholia and slightly paranoid nostalgia in their melodies to carry the day.
Evaporator satisfies in a low-stakes way, providing an oasis of chill in a world on fire; it’s an episode of Friends with a spoonful of vanilla ice cream, a familiar joy that won’t trouble the palate. But the record’s first-thought-best-thought spontaneity comes at the expense of ambition. Like a kind of obsolescence foretold, Evaporator’s 11 songs don’t really go anywhere, locked into the perpetual first act of circular motion. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs drummer Dextro turns up for “Baltasound” and nothing really changes, while the underwhelming “Slow Yamaha” proves that a nine-minute run time is no guarantee of sonic progression. Only Clark collab “Orbiting Meadows” stretches its wings slightly, bringing a touch of acoustic instrumentation and dissonance to the mix, but the apple cart remains resolutely un-upset. That’s perfectly satisfying for the lizard brain, but the attentive listener may long for the occasional act two to lift Evaporator out of its honeyed electronic stupor and toss a touch of sand in the gears.
