“I think this is the best thing we’ve ever done,” says bdrmm’s Ryan Smith. “It’s a proper step up.”

It’s immediately clear that the Hull band – also made up of Joe Vickers, Jordan Smith and Conor Murray – have broken new ground on their latest album, which is, as Ryan correctly points out, the band’s most fully realised, complete, and greatest work to date.  “The last album was essentially like a bridge between the two albums,” explains Joe, of 2023’s I Don’t Know. “With that one we knew what we were trying to do but with this one we’ve fully cracked it.”

It’s unquestionably a bold leap forward for the group, who have embraced a fuller spectrum of sounds, tones and atmospheres. “I felt very constrained writing a certain type of music to fit the genre [we were known for] but something lifted and I felt freer to create what I want,” says Ryan. “And what I seem to be doing at the moment is a lot of electronic music – taking influence from different spans of electronica, from dance music to ambient and experimental stuff.”

bdrmm’s trademark sound hasn’t completely disappeared by any means, you’ll still find beautifully layered guitars interlocking seamlessly with purring bass and crashing drums to create engulfing waves, but they are now integrated into a broader, more expansive and varied sonic palette. Just take ‘Infinity Peaking’ for example, a stirring piece of music that gracefully runs the gamut from post-rock meets shoegaze into a beautifully serene yet hypnotic synth-washed groove. “You can really see the holistic process of using guitars and synths together to create this new sound,” Jordan says of this song.

It’s a wonderfully woozy piece of music that is equal parts euphoric and melancholic, the kind of track you could imagine hearing on a Balearic Island somewhere as the sun creeps up over an open-air dance floor. Which makes sense when you find out the roots of the song. “The first couple of demos I wrote were in Malaga,” says Ryan. “It was so weird to be writing music in such a scenic and beautiful place. That really fed into certain songs like ‘Infinity Peaking’, which were written while sitting in the heat. It felt so freeing to be able to write somewhere that wasn’t just a fucking dingy bedroom.”

bdrmm’s decision to embrace new sounds has also stretched to new collaborators, with Working Men’s Club Sydney Minksy Sargeant, along with Olivesque (aka Nightbus), both featuring on the record. In fact, another leftfield turn from the group was having Minksy Sargeant sing on the opening track ‘goit’. “We thought it would be quite disarming having someone sing on the first song that wasn’t Ryan,” says Jordan. The result is a brooding, almost eerie, piece of deeply textural deconstructed dance music that in many ways sets the tone for the rest of the record.

“The theme of the whole record is kind of dystopian,” says Ryan. “Ever since lockdown, I personally don’t feel like I have been the same. I don’t really think that anyone has been; the amount of anxiety that has clouded everywhere it’s just a really weird place to live and it almost doesn’t feel real. It’s like an episode of Black Mirror. So, for Syd, we gave him the instructions of wanting it to sound as [David] Lynchian as possible – like, imagine you are narrating Eraserhead or something.”

Other themes that pop up on the record include ideas around distorted and forgotten memories, as well as hauntology, inspired by the work of the later writer and theorist Mark Fisher. “His ideas around the lack of any future really rung true with what Ryan was singing about at the same time,” says Jordan.” For Olivesque’s feature, ‘In The Electric Field’, the band had Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ in the back of their mind and so chose to utilise a female voice as a counter to the dark, chugging, slow burn pulse of the track.

Being asked to support Daniel Avery, along with a trip to Field Day for a group rave, were both instrumental moments in the band deciding to incorporate more dance music elements. However, it’s not a flash in the pan decision. This is something they have wanted to do for years but maybe didn’t possess the full confidence or knowhow to pull it off before.  ‘John on the Ceiling’ is actually one of the band’s oldest songs. “I wrote it when I was 18 and so it predates the first album,” says Jordan. It didn’t quite find a home previously but the propulsive yet melodic skip of the track “laid the groundwork for how we approached the other tunes on this album and set the precedent for how we approached songwriting.”

This approach to songwriting is deeply collaborative. Eschewing the typical jam-it-out in the studio as a band approach, the group, along with long-time producer Alex Greaves, instead all chip in remotely to a song and build it up between them. “It’s much more cut and paste rather than traditional songwriting,” says Jordan. “Much more abstract with the way that we approach it.” For Ryan, it’s completely mixed things up. “When you write a demo you become so precious about it,” he says. “But then letting go of that and completely going in collaboration mode, it just completely opens it up. The beauty of collaboration is someone will add something that you won’t even think about, and it will completely change the record. Opening yourself up to that vulnerability brings out so much positivity. It’s brilliant to have a record where everyone’s been involved.”

The result is an album that is bursting with life and vivacity. No more so is this clear on tracks like ‘Lake Disappointment’ which is a riotous bass-heavy mix of sounds that remains a constantly unpredictable track, as it bounces from genre to genre with giddy abandon. “It stemmed from nowhere but I think it’s come out as one of our strongest tracks,” Ryan says. “It was the last track that was written for the record and it’s the first time that I’ve ever really written anything on bass. I must have been listening to Thom Yorke’s solo stuff I think and I just stuck a distortion on the bass and then came up with that lead riff and I was like, fucking hell, we’re cooking. From there, it just took off.” You can also hear a touch of Yorke and co. on the itchy yet infectious ‘Snares’ and its gloriously twitchy drum programming.

Microtonic is the sound of a band finding confidence and feeling comfortable but using that position to thrust themselves into the unknown rather than rest on their laurels. It’s an ambitious album that is rich in scope and teeming with ideas yet also thoughtfully coherent. It is the sound of the band being themselves in the purest form possible says Ryan: “I think we’ve gone from people saying that we sound like other bands to hopefully people saying: this is what bdrmm sound like. It’s a true expression of who we are.”