Klara Lewis - Opening (2026)

Plunging headfirst into fuzzy psychedelic melancholia, Klara Lewis leans into her role as this generation's Mego figurehead, mulching acoustic samples and offhand recordings until the concept of analog and digital vanishes in the aether. Properly good - required listening if you're into PITA, early Fennesz or Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.

We should have known when we heard her killer 20-minute redraft of PITA's 'Get Out' standout 'Track 3' that Lewis had entered a new phase in her artistic evolution. That track, part of a pared-down album of dedications to the sorely missed Mego boss, felt like a turning point, a way for Lewis to pay her respect to the "extreme laptop music" family tree. And 'Opening' builds on those foundations; it's a free-er record than 2020's brief but powerful 'Ingrid', similarly cinematic - two of the cues were originally composed for Mika Taanila's experimental film 'Failed Emptiness' - but refreshingly free of the self seriousness that bogs down so much contemporary experimental music. That mischievous element is exactly what made 'Thankful' so gratifying; Lewis followed Rehberg's example and harnessed the power of juxtaposition, messiness and absurdity, the aspects that made the Mego catalog so enduringly distinctive.

And she's never sounded as liberated as she does on 'Opening'.. From the intro track 'Ta Min Hand' there's a self-assured swagger that's wholly captivating. Perhaps it's the way Lewis uses distortion, uglifying a soaring loop in a such a way that the showboating romance becomes genuinely heartbreaking. Just tune into how she isolates schmaltzy horns and makes them part of her vocabulary, pitch-shifting them to assure us she's in control. As soon as the track fizzles out, it's replaced by a very different expression of noise, a grottily captured urban excursion that's disrupted by a passing jazzy guitar - she lets the environmental recording play out to force us to pay attention; when we hear voices, they don't quite sound human, eventually raptured by deafening distortions. The impact on the listener is startling - like an ice cream van with a busted speaker careening into a quiet Northern European plaza.

These various short-form experiments - like the heady, orchestral 'Vaknar' and 'Hardcore', a simple, memorable piano riff that Lewis sculpts into a fragile symphony - lead towards the album's lengthy centerpiece 'Tide', a track she originally composed for 'Dissolving Strawberry', a compilation released last year on Stockholm's Irrlicht label. Here, she takes her time, upsetting an implacable sample with cautious glitches and anxious hesitations. If anything, it's a breather between the album's two sides, cushioning the blow as Lewis pushes into even quirkier territory on the second half. 'How Far', sounds like an early AFX demo, all broken synths and strangulated voices, while 'Small Harp' is a tonal study using what sounds like a zither. On 'Drip', Lewis plays ukulele, accompanying brittle strums with ruptured subs that increase in intensity with each terrifying hit, before leading us out with the title track, a noisy mellotron-like drone vignette that plays like a thank you for staying locked in.