Add to playlist: the year’s best electronic debut from Sheffield’s NZO, plus the week’s best tracks

The mysterious new artist’s thrillingly complete sound world is glitchily complex but beguilingly light on its feet

From Sheffield, via Leeds
Recommended if you like Mark Fell, Jlin, Beatrice Dillon
Up next Live set at No Bounds festival in October

It’s thrilling and satisfying when an artist’s debut album is so fully realised: as if they have their own hyperlocal dialect, and are saying something genuinely new with it. So it is with NZO, a mysterious Sheffield-based electronic artist whose album Come Alive is a defibrillating jolt of vitality. You can find affinities with other artists and styles here, for sure: the bookish but playful minimalism of another Sheffield musician, Mark Fell; Objekt’s trickster vision for bass music and techno; the white-tiled cleanliness of some of Sophie’s work; Jlin’s paradoxically static funk. But the way it’s all pulled together is totally NZO’s, making for music that’s so light on its feet despite its incredible complexity.

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