It’s nigh-on impossible to retain an air or even a measly puff of mystery these days. But Tennessee-born experimental noise artist Yves Tumor is a slippery prospect. He has gone by numerous pseudonyms. He is evasive in interviews. And his aesthetic – androgynous, fashion-forward, Marc Bolan by way of Marilyn Manson – is as uncategorisable as his music.
Since 2010, over three albums and various EPs, Tumor has honed an alluringly sensuous style of sample collage that sounds like little else. He has achieved, if you like, a kind of genre anonymity, running his fingers over the likes of ambient, R&B, boogie, trip-hop and noise, and folding them into something eerily ambiguous, as if you’re squinting into fog lights or listening to a very witchy Avalanches. “I’m very into making moods,” he has said, and his previous album, 2016’s Serpent Music, was full of slinkily undone come-hither funk.
Now signed to Warp, Tumor has found a new mood as well as a wider audience. Earlier this month, he surprise-released his new album, Safe in the Hands of Love, which incorporates feelings of claustrophobia, uncertainty and, er, 90s alt-rock. The punchy, big beat-style Noid takes on police brutality and is the most accessible track he’s made yet; there is shoegaze and Britpop’s sing-speak elsewhere. It shouldn’t work, perhaps, but like all the best mysteries there’s plenty to be unravelling for a long while.
