Actress - Karma & Desire (2LP)

Actress has spent the last decade making dance music that slips through your fingers, and Karma & Desire might be his most enveloping version of that trick. Released on Ninja Tune on October 23, 2020, it arrives after the stark architecture of AZD and the sprawling NTS Sessions, yet it plays like a private drama. He described it as a “romantic tragedy set between the heavens and the underworld,” and the phrase fits. The record moves in hushes, small gestures, and fogged edges, but the emotions are big and immediate.

The opener eases you into a mood rather than a genre, and by the time Walking Flames appears, the album starts to glow. Sampha’s voice, bright yet cracked with feeling, threads through Actress’s humid synths and half-buried percussion. There is no rush to fill space. Instead, vaporous pads bloom around Sampha’s phrases, and a quiet pulse keeps time like a heartbeat in another room. It is one of the clearest bridges between Actress’s abstract sound world and a classic song form, and it earns its place as the advance single that set the tone for the release.

Zsela’s turn on Angels Pharmacy is another anchor. Her vocal is patient and poised, almost weightless, and Actress builds a soft-lit chamber around it, all soft bass pressure and glassy keys. He lets her voice sit in the middle of the frame, then gently scuffs the edges so the track feels dreamt rather than staged. The album has other voices drifting through as well, and they are used with intent. Rather than chase pop structure, the features become instruments inside a larger mosaic, bright points of focus that pull your ear forward.

Much of Karma & Desire is instrumental, and those passages carry the record’s emotional load just as convincingly. Actress leans on simple, repeated keyboard figures, the kind that feel like you have heard them before in a half-remembered film. He teases a kick here, a hi-hat there, then lets them smear back into the reverb tail. Bass is key, low and warm, suggestive rather than domineering. These are not club tools, though a DJ could probably thread one into a late set. They are scenes, cut to mood and pacing, and the sequencing is sharp. Short interludes connect longer pieces with a filmmaker’s sense of transition.

The sound design rewards attention. You catch tiny details on the third or fourth listen, like a crackle that turns into rhythm, or a synth tone that shades from metallic to bell-like as it decays. Nothing is overdrawn. The restraint is part of the pleasure. Actress has always excelled at texture, and here he organizes those textures into a narrative that feels tender, even humane. The album’s romance sits in the gaps, in the way a chord hangs for a beat longer than expected, or a melody folds back on itself like a memory.

On vinyl the record opens up even more. The low end blooms, the air around the vocals gets thicker, and those near-silent transitions feel cleaner. If you are the sort who loves browsing shelves for Actress vinyl, this one deserves a spot, right next to Splazsh and R.I.P. The Karma & Desire vinyl pressing is the way to live inside these mixes, to feel the pressure of the subs without losing the delicate top end. If you tend to buy Actress records online, make the time to play this start to finish, no skips, lights low. The arc makes sense that way. Collectors hunting for Actress albums on vinyl will appreciate how this sits in the catalog, a late-night companion that connects the rugged edges of his early work with the softer focus he has explored since.

Context helps, but the music stands on its own. The album followed a burst of activity that reaffirmed his restlessness, yet Karma & Desire is calm at its core. It is also generous, inviting you back with little hooks that are not quite hooks, more like gestures you want to revisit. If you stumble across a copy while crate-digging at a Melbourne record store, or if you are scrolling a shop that ships vinyl records Australia wide, do not hesitate. This is Actress dialing precision and feeling to the same setting, a record that proves abstraction can be warm, and that electronic music, when handled with this much care, can tell a love story without raising its voice.