‘Nothing’ is the third album from Darkside – nine transmissions of negative space, telepathic seance, and spectral improvisation. It fittingly started from scratch. On their first two reinventions, Nicols Jaar and Dave Harrington entered the studio with a clutch of scattered ideas and loose melodic fragments to mould into what became the revered Psychic(2013) and Spiral (2021). But Nothing reflected a search for form borne out of spontaneous elliptical jams, acoustic riffing, and digital levitations.

In a fundamental shift from their first dozen years as a band, Jaar and Harrington recruited their longtime friend and collaborator, the drummer and instrument designer Tlacael Esparza, to become a full-time member. The outcome is magnetic and hieroglyphic. This album slips through the cracks of convention with