Metronomy Forever would be a braggadocious title if the music weren’t so self-deprecating. The sixth studio album from Devonshire musician Joe Mount is a tangled and tongue-in-cheek meditation on legacy, ending on a sparse postscript titled “Ur Mixtape,” which functions as a sort of punchline. Speak-singing his way through the memory of a fumbled young romance, Mount describes running into his crush’s brother, years later. The brother, recognising Mount, enthusiastically tells him how much he cherished the mixtape that Mount made, a decade earlier, to impress his sister. It’s a wry ending to an album that grapples with the question of how you’d like to be remembered: Even if you dedicate your life to crafting a legacy—in Mount’s case, a successful career at the forefront of ’00s and ’10s British electro-indie—you can never really control other people’s memories.

The sardonic bait-and-switch characterises the mood of Metronomy Forever. Having co-written and co-produced Robyn’s cathartic 2018 record Honey, and moved to a house in the English countryside with space to build his own studio, Mount made this album alone, just for the heck of it. (The live band includes drummer Anna Prior, bassist Olugbenga Adelekan, and Oscar Cash and Michael Lovett on keys and guitars.) You can hear this lack of inhibition in the directionless psychedelia of the instrumental interludes, and in some wilfully shallow lyrics: “She’s like a dream/Salted caramel ice cream” is a hook as delicious, and as meaningless, as its subject matter.

With Mount content to simply get in his groove, the casual approach gives rise to some of Metronomy’s best songs in years. The dreamy surf guitars, funk bass, and taut drums of “Whitsand Bay” hark back to their 2011 hit “The Bay” in more ways than one. “Salted Caramel Ice Cream” is a dancefloor stomper drizzled with zany synth melodies, plus a hint of the güiro that made a playful appearance on “The Look.” On the daft yet lovable “Sex Emoji,” Mount duets with himself in a coy falsetto over blown-out electro-funk; meanwhile, dance interludes like the twilight creep of “Miracle Rooftop” provide moments of introspection alongside the bombast (and a heady reminder of his skills as a producer).

These retreads of Metronomy’s best bits are not all nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake—instead, subtle changes indicate an older, wiser band with new emotional maturity. On “Insecurity,” a song dripping in macho swagger, Mount sings about the harmfulness of masculine posturing. In front of the blindingly bright synths of lead single “Lately,” his plain, unadorned singing about the hard work of love has a real pathos.

For anyone not already misty-eyed with nostalgia for Metronomy, however, a meandering 17-track album is a hard sell. As one instrumental interlude is titled, “Forever Is a Long Time”—and Metronomy Forever is a long album. At times, it’s difficult to determine whether the recycling is deliberate. “Wedding” kicks off the album with a grandiose, church organ sweep, but later, on the plodding “Wedding Bells,” Mount delivers a “gotcha!” by revealing that the titular bells are “not for me.” This at least seems like a choice, while his use of both “Insecurity” and “Insecure” as track titles scans as a rehash.

The decision to keep all these short, unfulfilled song ideas is either carefree or cynical, depending on your perspective. “Now, basically all music is ambient music, or can be. I think it gives musicians a load of freedom,” Mount told Dazed. “Drake records are, like, one hundred tracks long? And half of it’s awful—but it’s wicked.” Intentionally making musical wallpaper doesn’t sound like an exciting prospect, but Mount seems invigorated by abandoning the pursuit of the perfectly structured 10-track record. Perhaps it’s this liberation that allowed him to write a handful of brilliant new entries in the Metronomy catalog—comfortable in the knowledge that listeners who missed the band’s first wave are most likely to discover their work in fragments, regrouped and playlisted in the context-free world of streaming platforms. There, “The Bay” will slide timelessly into “Salted Caramel Ice Cream,” strutting on and on, forever.

Buy: Rough Trade

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