After his final album as Gold Panda, Derwin Dicker thought he could be finished with the alias. The UK musician had made three full-lengths below that title, sampling thrift-store vinyl into wistful electronica that caught the sunshine like a area of wheat on the golden hour. However after wrapping the third LP, 2016’s Good Luck and Do Your Finest, he thought of placing his signature palette out to pasture, together with some shopworn codecs. “You realize, 11-track albums with an arc, that’s over,” he declared.
For the subsequent six years, Gold Panda principally went darkish as Dicker tried out new concepts. A few of his subsequent output didn’t fall too removed from the tree: He and Simian Cellular Disco’s Jas Shaw teamed up as Promoting for a 2018 album that, regardless of the absence of samples, shared Gold Panda’s genial gleam. However as DJ Jenifa, he opted as an alternative for club-ready home bangers. He wandered even additional afield because the semi-anonymous Softman, buying and selling his trusty MPC for arcane software program instruments like Max and Pure Knowledge, and ditching the secondhand wax in favor of bronze temple bells and coolly restrained minimal techno as frictionless and utilitarian as brushed chrome steel.
With The Work, Dicker returns to his principal challenge—and together with it, some outdated habits that he mentioned he’d sworn off. Filled with luminous harps, winsome vocal snippets, and the sort of gently swung rhythms that Saint Dilla set in stone, The Work is each bit as lush and sun-drenched as its predecessors. It additionally occurs to be 11 songs lengthy, with a neat, naturalistic, dawn-to-dusk arc. (Oops.) However no matter hopes of reinvention he may as soon as have harbored, his return to his wheelhouse is hardly a foul factor; Dicker is, in actual fact, excellent at being Gold Panda.
This glowing pressure of electronica, a lineage that descends via Boards of Canada and 4 Tet, is an more and more crowded lane, and within the fingers of a much less proficient artist, it may simply flip to pastel mush. However regardless of the laid-back loops and unassuming air, Gold Panda’s music couldn’t simply be confused for mood-based playlist fodder. The grooves are too tangled, the tones too bruised. There’s a real emotional cost right here, one which goes past the apparent nostalgia signaled by the crackle of scratchy vinyl. Clinging to his hangdog chord progressions and weeping-willow keyboards is a bittersweet air that implies a man not simply idly jabbing at his drum pads however actively grappling with some heavy shit.
