Apr 8

Apr 8 Album Review : Andrew Nolan - Sacrifice (2026)

There is a compulsion for music critics to describe any dark instrumental music like it's supposed to be some kind harrowing experience. We love to use qualifiers like "barren and "suffocating" to interpret any experience that is not straightforwardly uplifting, but sometimes these qualifiers are straight up wrong. Underground music legend Andrew Nolan's latest album Sacrifice is not barren or suffocating by any stretch of the imagination. It very much feels alive, but in a way that's cosmically indifferent to your presence.

Sacrifice features eight songs and twenty-nine minutes of electronic music inspired by hip-hop, dub, industrial and noise, but that somehow sounds like none of these. It's a very precise sound that only Andrew Nolan could come up with. The songs are mid to downtempo and flow into one another the way a soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist. There’s a weird relaxing quality to it, but it also feels exciting in the way doing something forbidden knowing you won’t get caught is.

A lot of what Sacrifice sounds like is rooted in Andrew Nolan's philosophy while recording it. He explains in promotional literature that "the sound of structural damage, electromagnetic interference, household appliances, environmental sounds and samplers dying mid-live performance feature heavily on Sacrifice" and you can definitely hear it. The disturbed hum of normalcy and functionality being repurposed into an object with the purpose to transmogrify the most immutable notions of nature and purpose.

But as it almost always is the case with Nolan's music, there's a part that is irrevocably his and one that is irrevocably yours. If there's one theme that intuitively jumped out at the listener, it's the use of crackling electrical sounds on The Unlived World, The Salt Path, The Room of Silent Minds and more discreetly When the Sun is High and Fierce. It’s used as an overarching theme creating this aura of natural spectacle you're not meant to see, like a thunderstorm over at lake in the middle of the night.

A song like Our Voices Are Already the Wind uses the sounds of life and nature in a more upfront way, contextualizing the persistence of electrical sounds into a larger, more complex paradigm of nocturnal chaos. There’s Worse Things Than Serpents enlarges this aforementioned paradigm into the realm of electrical glitch and unknown technological malfunction, placing the creations of God and the creations of men in an uncomfortable balance.

Everything has its place in Nolan's creations.

If Andrew Nolan's mixtape Monochrome Vol. 2: Tentacles of Spiritual Contagion mirrored dreamlike images of post-apocalyptic nightclubs, Sacrifice is very much an outdoors record. The ideas it conjures are more tactcile and vibrant, but also more abstract. A song like The Salt Path for example is dominated by the sheer force of electrical sound, but has a mid-tempo rhythmic construction of wandering walk under a dangerous sky: pleasant, but staggered and feverish.

It's even more of a sonically cohesive record than Monochrome Vol. 2 or his collaboraiton with Full of Hell Scraping the Divine were, It’s much less of an attention grabber and I don't necessarily mean this in a negative way. I’m gonna say something quite weird: it’s almost as if the music doesn’t care whether you like it or not, as if it was recorded to archive reality and a certain depth of feelings about it. Whatever place you find within Andrew Nolan's construction is yours and yours only.

I always hesitate to review electronic records because it's such foreign territory for me. But Andrew Nolan's music always elicits a powerful intuitive reaction from me. It conjured images and slippery storylines from place inside my mind I didn’t know existed. Sacrifices is definitely not a dark record. At least not for me. Nolan never quite operates from binary opposites. He's interested in unexplored sonic territories, things we’ve forgotten about and the unlikely bonds that music create.

This not dark and not luminous. It just is celebrating the complexity of being alive.