Cascade

Manchester appears on Cascade less as a postcard than as a set of coded memories. Sam Shepherd named one track “Afflecks Palace” after the city’s long-running emporium and another “Key103” after the local radio station, small clues to an album whose electronic surfaces are frequently animated by recollection. Floating Points has always made dance music with an unusually fine-grained ear for texture, but here the physical and the personal sit especially close together: synthesiser sequences rush forward while melodies seem to look backwards.

Cascade was released in 2024 as Shepherd’s first solo studio album since Crush in 2019. In between came the extraordinary collaborative album Promises with Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, followed by the ballet score Mere Mortals. Returning to a solo electronic record after those projects does not mean retreating to familiar ground. Tracks were recorded between EMS4 in London and studios in California, and the album’s scale ranges from tightly wound rhythmic engineering to long stretches where sound seems to expand beyond the grid.

“Birth4000” is an obvious entry point: dense, bright and almost violently propulsive, with a bass presence that makes its precision feel physical. “Del Oro” works through a different kind of repetition, allowing detail to accumulate rather than simply escalating. “Key103” folds the Manchester reference into one of the album’s clearest links between electronic motion and autobiography, while “Ocotillo” offers another change of perspective. Shepherd’s music can be technically intricate, but the record rarely feels like a demonstration. The interesting question is what all that control does emotionally.

Cascade topped the UK Dance Albums Chart and was met with widespread critical acclaim, but its best argument is contained in the sequencing itself. It works as a continuous environment while allowing each piece its own geometry. Listen closely to how a sound changes function over time: a pulse becomes melody, a texture becomes rhythm, a repeated figure starts to feel almost nostalgic. The album’s title is apt because its ideas keep spilling into one another. What begins as machine-like precision repeatedly turns into something unexpectedly human.