Semi Precious - Post-Euphoria (2021)

Post-Euphoria is an album forged in the heat of dance music’s peak moments yet far removed from the dancefloor, as it inadvertently captures the strange and dislocated mood of the current, cultural moment.

The album sees singer-songwriter-producer Semi Precious (real name Guy Baron) crafting a collection of ethereal pop songs and fragmented ambient compositions that suggest retrospection of bygone, blissful experiences, recollected at a distance. Further interpreting the notion of an “afterglow” as a reflective, in-between state that lingers once the rush of a night out subsides, Post-Euphoria fuses shattered sounds of both underground and commercial dance alongside Baron’s strangely intimate vocal delivery.

From excessively slowing down dance music samples as metaphor for prolonged reminiscence, through recreating fragments of lyrical ideas dealing with memory and recollection and to using MIDI, reverb and delay effects to connote notions of transformation and reincarnation, the album is rife with sonic tropes and nuanced references that create a layered and distinctive aesthetic language.