Daniel Avery – Tremor (Midnight Versions) (Domino) (13th Floor Album Review)
Daniel Avery’s Tremor (Midnight Versions) pushes the material of his sixth album back onto the dancefloor. Rather than inviting outside remixers, Avery reworks the entire record himself, reshaping its collaborative songs into darker, club-focused counterparts designed for late-night sets and strobe-lit rooms.
For more than a decade Avery has occupied a distinctive space within electronic music, balancing the intensity of techno with the broader scope of album-based composition. Since the breakthrough of Drone Logic in 2013, his work has gradually expanded to incorporate shoegaze textures, drifting atmospheres and an increasing number of vocal collaborators. Tremor pushed that collaborative spirit further, bringing together artists from across indie and electronic music. Midnight Versions takes that material and redirects it firmly back toward Avery’s club lineage.
The album wastes little time establishing its atmosphere. Opening track Greasy Off the Racing Line drops straight into a dark, skittering beat, bass tones pulsing beneath whispered vocals that surface and fade within the mix. The track moves between urgency and suspension, percussion slowing and accelerating while reverberating voices hover at the edge of the soundscape. That sense of instability carries into Neon Pulse, where rising drones and clipped, stuttering beats spiral upward before heavy bass notes drag the track back down again. Avery’s production thrives on this tension: rhythms rarely settle comfortably, instead circling, fracturing and reforming.
The early stretch of the album finds a deeper groove. I Feel You unfolds around a slow, breathing bass line that anchors soft vocals above it. The track gradually gathers movement without abandoning its hypnotic pulse, demonstrating Avery’s skill at building energy through repetition rather than dramatic drops. New Life shifts the momentum again, its rushing percussion evoking cars racing through a city at night before dissolving into echoing vocal spaces. Each return of the beat feels sharper and faster, the sense of motion building with each cycle.
The album’s centre leans most clearly into dancefloor propulsion. Rapture in Blue locks into a steady drum pulse as layered synth textures swirl overhead, gradually increasing in intensity before high, electronically treated vocals glide into the mix. Driven by tight percussion and shakers, the track captures the record’s club focus with particular clarity. A similar energy powers The Ghost of Her Smile, where rapid drum patterns stack into dense rhythmic layers before periodically dropping away to a single beat, only to surge back with renewed force.
Elsewhere, Avery introduces moments of contrast that deepen the album’s emotional range. In Keeping (Soon We’ll Be Dust) slows the pace, its light skittering beat floating above a low drone while darker bass tones gather beneath. Strings briefly appear midway through, adding an unsettled atmosphere before the piece dissolves into a grinding, ambient close. Later, A Memory Wrapped in Paper and Smoke offers one of the record’s most reflective passages. Crackles reminiscent of an old vinyl record accompany a slow-rising drone as percussion settles into a steady mid-tempo rhythm, the music drifting forward like the journey home after a long night out.
The closing stretch restores a sense of volatility. Until the Moon Starts Shaking layers competing drum patterns over pulsing electronics before fading and rebuilding in lighter tones, only to fracture again into jagged rhythms. Final track Disturb Me ends the album in similarly unsettled territory, its shifting synth textures and distorted percussion moving between bursts of intensity and quieter passages before stuttering abruptly to a halt.
Across Tremor (Midnight Versions), Avery shows how adaptable these compositions are, existing both as expansive collaborative songs and as tightly focused club tracks. By revisiting the material himself, he draws a clear line between those two worlds. The result reconnects Tremor with the dancefloor, its songs stripped back to rhythm, pressure and pulse.
John Bradbury
Tremor (Midnight Versions) is out March 6th on Domino Records
