Ben Frost today releases his third studio single in seven years, ‘Chimera‘, setting the stage for his much-anticipated album, Scope Neglect, due via Mute on March 1, 2024. 

As one would expect from Frost, it’s a brutalist and unsettling composition that injects heavy power metal chords (courtesy of Greg Kubacki of  Car Bomb) into screes of digital static, synths and detonating beats.

“There is always a shape and a sense of proportion that I am looking for. And with these elements, I was looking to sort of recalibrate some familiar mechanics with the hope of creating something new.”

At Candybomber Studios, situated at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, Frost, together with engineerIngo Krauss, upended the recording process from the outset, applying innovative recording techniques inspired by the well-documented approaches of Mark Hollis’ Talk Talk recordings. Frost revealed only parts of the arrangement to his collaborators, forcing their hand in one direction, only to repeat the process with an entirely different set of elements audible, thus pushing the dynamic somewhere else entirely. In many cases, Frost created entire orchestrations, constructed with the sole intent of driving Greg Kubacki and Liam Andrews’ ferocious performances, only to delete them entirely afterward.

“You can’t play like that, into the void. And so it demanded these convincing initial structures, which I had no intention of keeping. I wanted this sense of music that is listening… that has an awareness of something we can’t see. That produces a wholly different kind of silence.”