Sam Shepherd’s been busy over the past few years. Under his Floating Points guise, he teamed with the late, great Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra on 2021’s transcendent Promises. He did the score for the ballet Mere Mortals and is scoring an upcoming anime for Adult Swim. But he hasn’t released a solo Floating Points album since 2019, when he dropped Crush and a Late Night Tales compilation. That’s about to change.

On new album Cascade, Floating Points are back in their wheelhouse, making pulsating avant-garde club music. The album includes recent single “Del Oro” and last year’s “Birth4000,” as well as “Key103,” the crisp new seven-minute surge out today, named for “an underground Manchester radio station I’d listen to religiously.”

In a press release, Shepherd explains how the new album is inspired by Manchester:

There’s something about Manchester that keeps coming back to me, and I think it’s partly to do with its record shops. As a kid, my school was around the corner from the Northern Quarter so at lunchtimes, I’d run out of the school gates and skip lunch altogether to go and listen to records. I’m sure I was a total pain in the arse constantly pulling records off the shelves, but it was amazing. I’d be listening to Autechre at Pelican Neck, Dilla at Fat City, David Morales mixes at the Factory Records shop… It gave me a parallel education in music to what I was being taught at school.

Hear “Key103” below, set to visuals by Akiko Nakayama.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Vocoder (Club Mix)”
02 “Key103”
03 “Birth4000”
04 “Del Oro”
05 “Fast Forward”
06 “Ocotillo”
07 “Afflecks Palace”
08 “Tilt Shift”
09 “Ablaze”

Cascade is out 9/13 on Ninja Tune. Pre-order it here.