Let us be precise about what this record actually *is*, because vagueness is the enemy of good listening. *Ouroboros* is breakcore colliding with IDM at a velocity that would concern a traffic warden. It is the sound of a machine dreaming at 300BPM, waking up halfway through the dream, and deciding the waking was more interesting than the sleeping. The production — urgent, airless, claustrophobic in the most thrilling sense — positions Aux Volta somewhere in a very specific, very hostile triangle: the technical barbarism of Venetian Snares, the corroded industrialism of Drumcorps, and then, unexpectedly, the melodic hauntology of Aphex Twin on a bad Tuesday. The Björk comparison in their own press material initially seems like hubris. It is not. There are moments buried beneath the wreckage of the percussion where something almost tender surfaces, blinking in the noise like a creature unaccustomed to light. That is where the Björk comparison earns its keep.

The structural logic of *Ouroboros* — and there is logic here, however disguised by apparent chaos — is self-referential in ways that reward close listening. Motifs appear, are immediately dismantled, their components redistributed across the track like parts from a machine that has been deliberately sabotaged. Nothing resolves into the expected destination. Just as the ear settles on a rhythmic foothold, the ground shifts. This is compositionally deliberate, architecturally sound, and genuinely, repeatedly surprising — a combination rarer than it ought to be in electronic music, where the surprise is too often the first and only trick.

The visual collaboration with Venezuelan digital artist Carlos Eduardo Rodríguez (@im____cer) — reportedly deploying abstract graffiti aesthetics, physical textures, and looping geometries to create a kind of glitch-futurist visual language — is not incidental decoration. It is a second text running parallel to the first, and the two illuminate each other. The South American digital futurism that CER brings to the table is doing something culturally interesting against the implied geography of *Ouroboros*: these are London underground sounds getting their geometry warped by Caracas. The result is something that belongs, geographically and aesthetically, to neither city entirely — a music of the threshold.

One could levy a charge of maximalism against Aux Volta, and the charge would not be entirely without foundation. *Ouroboros* does not do restraint. It does not do understatement, quiet dignity, or the kind of artfully observed minimalism that wins favour in certain critical quarters. But to fault it for this would be to fault a thunderstorm for being wet. The record is exactly as loud, as dense, and as relentless as it intends to be. Intentionality, in art, is not nothing. It is, frequently, everything.

What *Ouroboros* ultimately represents is an uncommonly assured declaration from a project still establishing itself. The debut single *Bad Sector* announced a sensibility. *Ouroboros* refines that announcement into something that feels, against all odds, like a manifesto. The upcoming album, bearing the magnificently unwieldy title *Complex Solutions for Simple Problems We Do Not Understand*, will need to sustain this level of conceptual coherence and sonic invention across a full body of work — a harder task than any single can demonstrate. But on the evidence of this: they are, at minimum, pointing in a direction worth following, even if you have to sprint to keep up.