Extended

Berlin’s Modeselektor may come from the city’s techno scene—they were long signed to Ellen Allien’s BPitch Control label, after all—but they’ve generally preferred broken beats to techno’s four-to-the-floor stomp. Along with hip-hop and electro, dancehall has often been a latent presence in their music, and on Extended, the duo’s first album since 2019’s Who Else, those Caribbean rhythms come to the fore. In its staccato laser zaps and powdery snares, the opening “Minibus” is a none-too-subtle nod to the bone-dry digital dancehall that producers like Lenky were making around the turn of the millennium, and the next nine tracks dive head-first into those shuddering, syncopated grooves. Billed as a mixtape rather than an album proper, Extended is structured around clusters of tracks linked by tempo and rhythm, and after that opening stretch of dancehall, they notch up the tempo with “Puls”, revelling in a high-intensity mixture of bass, techno and IDM. The seamless format still permits a few obvious standouts: “The Germs” is bruising and weirdly carnivalesque, while “Mean” digs into overdriven electro in an Ilian Tape vein. Then, with a DJ’s sense of pacing, they close with the bare-knuckled techno of “Lockdown”, a scorched-earth drone that stands as a testament to the pure fire that has preceded it.