And what a return it is. Named after a novel by William Golding, The Inheritors quickly bewitches with an audio headspace that's very much Holden's own. If there's anything in his past that bears the sonic identifiers on display here, it's the wobbly analogue bliss-outs of his DJ-Kicks rather than the neo-trance at the heart of The Idiots or his famous "A Break In The Clouds." Forged from single takes on his modular synth with no overdubs, The Inheritors has the blurry, delirious effect of an eighty-minute heatstroke. Holden's described some of the work here as a new kind of rave music, one that alludes to ancient English historical practices like pagan rituals, and there's certainly some kind of peculiar cosmic spiritualism linking these fifteen tracks.
Holden has long been associated with various incarnations of trance, and he's still after that state, though he uses a different approach. The album is a collection of analogue workouts that buzz and heave through a vast spectrum of sounds, which Holden stitches together into a work of astonishing coherence. Just listen to the way Etienne Jaumet's saxophone freakout at the end of "The Caterpillar's Intervention" gives way to cathedral-like tones and scrapes of static on "Sky Burial." Or how the ambient swirl of "Illuminations" decays into the half-submerged cracklings of "Inter-City 125." "Seven Stars," meanwhile, is the sort of 3 AM catatonia that might have graced an early Nathan Fake LP, but sounds here like it's been left to bake in the heat until its melodies seeped away. The title track takes these distorted blasts and elongates them into a kind of burnt techno that almost resembles Fuck Buttons.
All of these tracks eventually build toward the cathartic galaxy sprawl of "Blackpool Late Eighties." At eight-and-a-half-minutes long, it's by some stretch the record's longest track; it also sounds most like what fans of "A Break in the Clouds" might have thought Holden would sound like come 2013. It's peaceful and distantly serene, but with flickers of dissonance rubbing away at the edges. Those contrasting textures are part of what makes The Inheritors perhaps the year's most revealing and intriguing album yet.