Action Adventure

For his seventh album, DJ Shadow removed a familiar temptation: there are no featured vocalists to organise the record around. After the guest-heavy Our Pathetic Age, Joshua Davis deliberately turned back towards making music for himself, asking what interested him as a composer, producer, collector and listener when nobody else needed a runway into the track. The answer is a mostly instrumental album whose restlessness feels personal rather than showy.

Preparation involved exactly the sort of archaeological listening associated with Shadow. Davis bought around 200 tapes of 1980s radio mixes on eBay and dug into unheard corners of his own collection of roughly 60,000 records. He has described the album as a reflection of his relationship with music and his life as a collector and curator. That background explains why Action Adventure rarely settles into a single historical period: synthesiser lines, breakbeats, sample textures and electronic detail feel less like genre references than material pulled from a lifetime of listening. “Ozone Scraper”, released as the lead single in August 2023, is one of the album’s brighter entrances, driven by energetic synths and crisp rhythmic motion. Elsewhere, Davis said he challenged himself to write music with different energies and to seek chord progressions that felt natural without becoming predictable. That is a good way to approach the record. Its 57 minutes are less a linear narrative than a series of changing rooms, unified by an ear for unusual juxtapositions and the pleasure of hearing a producer leave the edges of his method visible.

Released through Mass Appeal on 27 October 2023, Action Adventure received generally favourable reviews, though the response was less uniformly ecstatic than for some earlier DJ Shadow records. That feels almost beside the point. This is an album about autonomy, made by an artist with enough history to stop chasing a definitive statement. Its strength is curiosity: the sense that Davis is still asking what happens when one sound is placed beside another, then following the answer wherever it leads.