Röyksopp - Senior (2010) [Wall of Sound] // Grade: B-

Royskopp albums take time. Let’s deal with this straight away: I have never, in all my years of loving the Norwegian electro duo, of sinking deep into their songs like swampy, soupy quicksand, understood their releases at first listen. To wit: after the undulating pop-cum-two step punch of debut Melody A.M., 2005’s The Understanding felt incomplete to me. Too polished and samey. Where was the drive, the purity of emotion? Where, god help me, was Erlend effing Oye?

But suddenly, months later and without warning, it clicked into place like so many Legos. The heart-wrenching cry of mortality on “Only This Moment”, The Knife’s Karin Dreijer-Andersson wailing over ghosts in “What Else Is There?”—The Understanding wasn’t the warm bass and cerebral twin to the duo’s debut, but its own pocketed little thing; this pop-fraught lyrical exploration of human emotion, right, and the sometimes fractional difference between stoked and sad. Got it.

Enter last year’s long-awaited Junior. Let’s dig in: we’ve got the now-famous Karin on “This Must Be It” and “Tricky Tricky” (I can get behind that), Euro-idol Robyn on the bubbles and cream “Girl and the Robot” (I mean…sure, okay), the opening double-dutch skip of “Happy Up Here”—alright, what the hell are they doing? These lyrics are banal. Those beats so pepped and lively. These are mass-intended synth-pop jams, pure and simple, and aside from one or two strategic tonal shifts, there’s not much there there. Which was, of course, precisely the point. Strip the expectation—strip the emotional substance—forget The Understanding, just forget it, and focus on those brilliant melodies, how effortlessly the thing invites you to dance—only then does Junior become great.

Which brings us to the new thing, this moody and vocal-free Senior, the only Royksopp album pitched directly as a counterpoint to its predecessor. The boys lay it on the line early: second track “Tricky 2” is a 6+ minute instrumental re-edit of Junior’s “Tricky Tricky”, sprawling and languorous, proclaiming broadly “this is not what you expected, and it’s probably not even what you want.” But it is what Royksopp have been raised to do; those formative years in Tromso, kicking around with all that Bergen Wave and recording as the hazy, sometimes static Aedena Cycle, have instilled in them a sense of quiet ambience, subtle sweetness. To betray it would be to never circle back. To shuffle down the wrong path, as so many critics suggest they’ve done, would be to make another, poppier Junior. This album isn’t where America wanted Royksopp to go. It isn’t what the UK craved either. But maybe, who knows for sure, it’s what parental Norway has silently asked of them.

Cozy up with these tracks. Spend some time. The old-west shuffle of “Forsaken Cowboy”, the heavy beat and space melody of “The Alcoholic”, the sweetly sad and sort of morbid “Senior Living” played off central jam “The Drug” and its undulating jaunt through minimal techno—these things evoke, say, The Field (and sometimes Brian Eno) far more readily than they do Melody A.M. Senior isn’t immediate; it’s the least immediate thing, in fact, that Royksopp have ever done. And it doesn’t evoke a sense of place, that intangible and melancholy something the duo have always had buzzing behind them. Objectively, that’s a problem. But it also begs an important question: how much, precisely, is their music required to evoke? If Junior was a happy-go-lucky pop and production centered album, Senior is its electro-head tech and gear centered partner. Love it or hate it—and I’m not sure exactly where I fall yet—this is about perfectionism. The subtlety of sound. It’s about a stray drum tone, that one organic bird-sample, the great buzz and hum swelling upwards in “The Fear”. It’s about where they’ve been as Aedena Cycle and where they could go as a quieter, more studio-focused and niche Royksopp. But they’ll probably never go there—they’ve never done what we’ve expected of them, really. It may take months to understand the trajectory, it may take years, but it’ll be clear eventually. And by the time you figure it out, they’ll have moved on to the next, confounding thing.

- Rue Sauvage