Highgrade - 2022 UK Domino Label 10-track 2LP Set

For an album that was born out of and revels in the love of kinship and community, it seems only natural that a community of artists should transform it far beyond its already experimental bounds. Knowing this, Tirzah carefully selects artists to throw her kaleidoscopic second album Colourgade in the wash with this remix album.

Where Colourgrade expanded Tirzah’s sound palette, Highgrade shakes it, stirs it, and mixes it into an even more dynamic and all encompassing vision, bringing out hidden potential that lurked within the songs all along. The syrupy textures of ‘Sink In’ are now even more hypnotic, the kinetic zaps of ‘Hips’ rippling and rebounding even more intensely. As Tirzah puts it, “The pieces can live another life and come together as a collection of hybrids.”

Highgrade begins with the feeling of a band busking outside a laundromat as Kwake Bass's Speakers Corner Quartet fold plucked bass, lilting strings and smooth flutes over each other. In total contrast, Lafawndah takes ‘Crepuscular Rays’ to a more subconscious domain full of mysterious winds imbued with instinctual energy. On her ‘Vortex Remix’ of ‘Colourgrade’, Arca turns Tirzah’s voice into an ethereal and disembodied instrument, a playful exploration all at once freeform and formless, radiant and irradiated. Perhaps the most unpredictable re-imagination here is from Still House Plants, their ‘Send Me 22222 Rework’ starting with gnarly and grizzled guitars and evolving into labyrinthine crashes and mesmerising vocal runs.

Tirzah made life on Colourgrade; on Highgrade that life blossoms in all directions, supported by passionate remixes from a vibrant community of artists.