Artist
Label
Andy Stott
Faith In Strangers
Modern Love
/
2025
2LP (arctic pearl)
37.99
Love098LPX
2024 repress, edition of 500 copies
Incl. VAT plus shipping / Orders from outside the EU are exempt from VAT
Tracklist
1Time Away 6:24
2Violence 6:38
3On Oath 8:09
4Science And Industry 5:32
5No Surrender 4:59
6How It Was 6:09
7Damage 4:35
8Faith In Strangers 6:29
9Missing 4:56

Now 10 years old, ‘Faith In Strangers’ is Andy Stott’s career-defining blunge of screwed production and timeless songs, a pinnacle of brittle, technoid future-primitivism that arcs from solo brass to mechanised Grime, from knackered House to lilting pop, like some ancient relic made of still incomprehensible materials..

'Faith In Strangers’ was recorded between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in July 2014. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it’s a largely analogue variant of hi-tech production arcing from the dissonant to the sublime.

Opener ‘Time Away’ features Euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe and closing track ‘Missing’ features vocals from Stott’s vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore. Between these two points ‘Faith In Strangers’ heads off from the sparse and infected ‘Violence’ to the broken, downcast pop of ‘On Oath’ and the motorik, driving melancholy of ‘Science & Industry’ - three vocal tracks built around a destroyed production style that's pioneering in spirit, buried in sentiment.

‘No Surrender’ is a primitive spell making way for pitch-screwed woodblock drums, while ‘How It Was’ refracts sweaty warehouse signatures and ‘Damage’ comes like RZA’s ‘Ghost Dog’ re-factored by Terror Danjah. The title track is the album's most beautiful, gliding on a chiming melody and the hum of Andy’s mixing desk.