Four Tet - Three [Text Records]

Some artists start playing it safe when the stages get bigger. Not so for Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, the heady, tasteful producer and crate-digging vinyl enthusiast, who has taken his newfound arena-sized crowds as an opportunity to bewilder, delight, and annoy. Behind the decks, no move is taboo, no track off-limits. A decade ago, that meant raising eyebrows by going back-to-back with Skrillex in the booth. Now that he and Sonny Moore have become a Rare Trio with Fred again.., the BFF B2B2Bs are Hebden’s chance to further subvert what you might have thought Four Tet should sound like. At Madison Square Garden, he dropped a mischievous minimal-house edit of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” that he’d put together for his daughter. At Coachella, he used the intro to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as the setup for an absurd punchline: Hol!’s “Country Riddim,” a dubstep anthem with a cartoonishly loud drop. (Hebden loves that song: at the trio’s surprise Times Square gig in February 2023, he dropped the track again, then rewound it to the top of the drop, just to savor its ridiculousness.)

But as unpredictable as Hebden is onstage, on record he’s as reliable as they come. Three is his 12th solo album, give or take—the proliferation of live recordings, early-works anthologies, shadowy side-projects, and full-length experimental excursions complicate the tally—and it embodies everything that has come to define Four Tet over the years. There are UK garage shuffle beats and moonlit pools of ambient, heavy head-nodders and floor-filling rave anthems, hand-carved breakbeats and harps, harps, and more harps.