- Production chameleon Jon Hopkins is always delivering something different: from work for Coldplay to the folktronic collaborations with King Creosote or creating ambience with Brian Eno. His latest album, Immunity, is a work he authored by himself and while it is, ostensibly an edm record, it is, in and of itself, as unexpected as Jon Hopkins ever is.

The source of the strangeness is, initially, the beats. It’s demonstrated adroitly on opener We Disappear which features more tricked out engineering on your standard four to the floor than anything else on the record. With all the glitch, snatches of white noise, mechanical clicks and whirs, you’d be well within your rights to label this idm, but that doesn’t do Hopkins justice. The track is only the most obvious example of a real ingenuity displayed across Immunity, where very old-school glitch (back when we still called things glitch) is mixed with even older-school techno. It often ends up sounding like Hopkins has taken a sledgehammer to his beats, leaving them slightly splintered and smeared across each track: impressionist dance music.

High concept, sure, but one that works. Hopkins immediately demonstrates that this really is, dance music, throwing down the gauntlet with the eight thrumming minutes of Open Eye Signal: minimal techno to move your body while your mind quakes at a backdrop of awesome ambience.

He’s clearly having a lot of fun mixing up his styles: the oddly undulating downbeat crawl of Breathe This Air champs at the bit, trying to take off, which it suddenly does with an exhilarating techno pound; it is equally quickly smothered, leaving only slow, ringing piano chords. Hopkins neatly recapitulates, bringing together these diverse styles in a eurodance whole.

The focus is returned to the main game on Collider. Nine minutes of rushing techno that, with each beat, sucks all of the treble out of the sound, but with absolute restraint channels in a synth ambience that, by the time it builds to its apex, would do Vangelis proud.

If you’re not a little bit exhausted after that, you’re doing it wrong and Abandon Window is the chillout room, or, more accurately, an ice cavern. The album is so obviously paced, sequenced, thought out, that the unexpectedly wonky beats of Form By Firelight come as something of a surprise - it’s almost cheeky. Also it did, for some reason, make me shift my perspective and realise that Immunity clicks easily into the recent list of records by artists like Actress and Vessel, deftly reimagining the history of electronic music and dance, bringing something vibrant and new to many a worn genre. When I heard that Jon Hopkins had described Immunity as “...the most human dance record you’ll hear all year”, it sounded a bit pretentious. However, listening to the warm, fading ambience of it’s title track and thinking about the new life he’s breathed into dance, he may just have earned the right to say such a thing.

- Chris Cobcroft.