Top ten best electronic music albums of 2021: Lone – Always Inside Your Head

Fat Roland's Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021 presents another brilliant album:

Lone – Always Inside Your Head (Greco-Roman)

Here, Lone, take a seat. Sit on the sofa, I'll take the futon. Are you comfortable? Have a cigar. You want to watch Netflix? Take an emery board, get those nails nice and neat. Put your feet up on the cat, that's fine. Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Yes, you can snuggle up to my Henry hoover. You make yourself at home.

He might as well move in. Lone has trudged around this part of my blog more often than me. In 2009, Ecstasy And Friends made my top ten end-of-year list then promptly blew my speakers. In 2012, he was my joint favourite album of the year. I called Galaxy Garden "in-your-face gorgeous." I say "gorgeous" a lot. For his album Reality Testing, my fourth favourite album of 2014, I raved about a "same kind of melancholia Brian Eno once gave earnest rock bands: a new tone for Lone." In 2016, I called Levitate a "junglist hymn to Good Looking Records and Goldie". 

Lone is back in my top ten list, back home where he belongs. In preparation for this album, he's been posting 'mood board' photographs on his social media. A fuzzy telly pic of Goldie. Old pics of what I think are Fluke and the Sneaker Pimps perhaps. But it's My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins that provide the main influence for this eighth album.

This is a hazy Lone. Clouds of heavenly vocals settle over floating streams of warm ambience. Slow trip hop rhythms amble care-free as lazy synth lines eddy and swirl. And it's oh-so-1990s, with flecks of happy trance and liquid drum and bass. I can even spot that new age flute sample so beloved of Enigma back in the day. Is that a Higher Intelligence Agency bleep sample? It feels very similar. Ah, this puts me in a good place.

Perhaps the centrepiece of Always Inside My Head is Akoya, a glowing puddle of ambient shoegaze smoked over with the angelic vocals of Morgane Diet – the album's best evocation of the extraordinarily personal and deep new Lone we find ourselves faced with. So soft, and yet so substantial.

No, you may not use the toilet. You can do it in the garden shed like all my other visitors. I like having you around, Lone, but limits are limits. Pssscht.

This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021. Read it all here.