Album Review: Daniel Avery – Tremor
2 min read
Daniel Avery has always occupied a fascinating corner of electronic music – once a techno wunderkind whose 2013 debut album Drone Logic cemented his place in the London club scene, he’s since become an artist who draws just as much from rock, shoegaze and acid-house as he does from the dancefloor. Now, with his sixth solo album Tremor, he takes a bold left turn – still electronic at heart but more guitar-soaked, collaborative and textured than ever. The record is a dense, shape-shifting world of distortion, melody and ghostly voices, a space where the line between dream and machinery blurs.
The opening pair of tracks sets the tone with contrast and ambition. Neon Pulse arrives like a synthetic sunrise – short and shimmering with Avery’s acid-tinged bass and floating melody luring you in. Next up, Rapture in Blue glides into mid-tempo territory, airy vocals over slowed breakbeats giving it a dreamy, almost shoegaze-club hybrid feel. Then comes Haze and A Silent Shadow, where guitars burst through the haze, drums sharpen and you feel the album’s intent – to morph a dancefloor pulse with post-rock intensity, shoegaze seen through an acid mirror.
Mid-album shifts carry the momentum into darker, noisier waters. Greasy Off the Racing Line featuring Alison Mosshart is a standout – motor-oiled groove, static-blasted guitars and her vocal swagger make it sticky and combustible. New Life softens things slightly with languid chords and breakbeat leanings while Until the Moon Starts Shaking offers a brief, haunting interlude. This interlude gives way nicely into The Ghost of Her Smile, a tender, vocal-led moment before Disturb Me plunges us into a place of deep ambient noise – a quiet storm of atmosphere and disquiet.
The closing sequence wraps things with warmth and catharsis. In Keeping (Soon We’ll Be Dust) channels classic shoegaze fuzz and emotional memory, its melody swells before fracturing into noise. By the time the title track, Tremor, rolls around, everything Avery’s been building – the noise, the tenderness, the unease – coalesces into one trembling release. Following this, A Memory Wrapped in Paper and Smoke provides a brief respite, an ambient breath and finally I Feel You closes the album with an expansive, synth-driven uplift – a sense of emerging from the fog rather than being lost within it.
This is Avery at his most expansive and restless – pulling in guitars, vocals, distortion, basslines and club rhythms and staging them all under one roof. Tremor is a record of movement and mutation, of sound shifting shape before your ears. It’s an album you don’t just listen to, you feel it, you inhabit it. As introspective as it is physical, it doesn’t just play in the room, it reverberates through it.
