Four years in the making, sketched between 2022 and 2026 across studios, stages and long nights of trial and error with collaborator Gatis Zaķis, *Rincore* arrives with the unhurried confidence of an artist who refused to rush the question he was actually trying to answer: what happens when a jazz-trained kit player starts thinking like a machine, and a machine starts thinking like a body?

Maksimovs's CV reads like a European conservatoire tour — drumming and composition studied across Latvia, Denmark and Sweden — and you can hear that pedigree in the record's sense of proportion. Nothing here is showy for its own sake. The technical facility is real, but it's harnessed rather than paraded, put to work in service of atmosphere and momentum rather than chops for their own sake. That's a rarer discipline than it sounds, and it's the thing that separates a drummer's album from a drum solo with a running time.

What makes *Rincore* genuinely exciting, though, is its refusal to sit still stylistically. Ambient textures drift in and settle like weather, only for a minimalist pulse to needle its way underneath and slowly assert control. Avant-garde flourishes — the kind that in lesser hands would announce themselves with a smirk — are folded in so naturally they feel less like gestures and more like the record simply thinking out loud. And running beneath all of it, insistently, is a dance-floor undertow that never quite lets the album drift into pure headphone abstraction. This is electronic music with a pulse you could feel in your chest, played by someone who has clearly spent real time in rooms where people move.

The clearest window into that balancing act is "Viegli nākamais liegums", the album's third track and the one Maksimovs chose to illustrate on film. It's a smart choice of calling card: a piece that lets the acoustic-electronic tension at the record's heart play out in miniature, live drumming and programmed pulse trading the lead like two dancers who've rehearsed just enough to know when to let go of the plan.

Visually, too, the record understands itself. Katriona Luīze Rožlapa's artwork doesn't illustrate the music so much as extend it — a fitting cover for a project that treats every element, sound and image alike, as part of one continuous idea rather than a collection of separate decisions.

Maksimovs has performed this material live across Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and the Baltic states before ever committing it fully to record, and that stage-tested quality shows. *Rincore* has the pacing of a set built to hold a room, not just a playlist. It's an album that trusts its own patience, confident enough in its ideas to let them unfold at their own tempo rather than front-loading the hooks.

British critics have long had a soft spot for records that sound like they were built rather than written — that treat the studio, and the body, as instruments in their own right. *Rincore* belongs unmistakably in that tradition: disciplined, exploratory, and driven by a rhythmic intelligence that never once loses sight of the dance floor. A genuinely absorbing debut, and a strong signal that Maksimovs has plenty more to say.