Press play, then close your eyes. antiehdas is nothing if not dazzlingly cinematic; you’ll want to concentrate.

It begins gently: Warmth. Soul. Layers appear one by one, movement gradually increasing, like some darkly luminescent liquid coming slowly to a boil. Sounds begin to crumble, texturize, gradually crystallizing into the loose suggestion of a backbeat. This continues for quite a while, settles in and soothes, so that when the drop finally comes it’s with an almost physical feeling of Whiplash! – and you’re over the top and screaming downwards. It’s so deep, so utterly persuasive, that it takes a minute before you start to hear the details.

Built up piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle, the source material is largely field recordings and homemade samples. It’s all about contrasts: rich keyboards and snippets of guitar next to bitcrushed ejecta, next to cryptic voice recordings, underscored by relentless beats that sound synthetic but feel human, all too human . . . all this buried in the darkly pulsing entity of the song, eclipsed by its sheer shirt-grabbing conviction. Even when they’re funny, these songs are serious.

Love, danger, struggle, redemption, endless landscapes: antiehdas creates tiny epics with his songs – Sergio Leone in a four-minute package. (PJ)