Weekly Download, Hudson Mohawke, "Warriors" featuring Ruckazoid & Devaeux

Ross Birchard has made the leap from beatmaker to genuine super-producer far more spectacularly than most. Long before Kanye West pulled him into his inner circle in 2012, Hud Mo was crafting MDMA-drenched, strobe light rap anthems from a bedroom in Glasgow. Many of these would eventually make up his legendary 2005 mixtape Hudson’s Heeters, his first release Hudson Mohawke Says Oops! (a cover of the timbaland producer ‘Oops’ by Tweet) and eventually his debut album for Warp, Butter (2009). These were kaleidoscopic stepping stones to future glory, equally informed by a certain golden age of electronic R&B and rap innovation as by the bracing freeform antics of prog rock and fusion jazz.

Now Hudson Mohawke is back with his first solo album in over five years and it’s everything you’ve wanted and very little of what you’ve expected. Lantern is a fusion album – the crystallization of everything he’s been working towards. On this record he was the final author – the final editor. No one stood to filter or sample him here. With Lantern he could fully realize the blueprint he’d been helping lay out for others. A contemporary fusion of avant-garde intention and urban pop intuition. A fusion of soaring orchestration and widescreen club dynamics. It looks unwaveringly towards the future while embracing an evolving, timeless canon of pop and soul music.