HAAi - Baby, We're Ascending (2LP) - Blue Sky Vinyl

HAAi’s debut album lands like a rush of cool air after a long night out, full of color, grit, and that peculiar tenderness that sneaks into the comedown. Released in May 2022 on Mute, Baby, We’re Ascending finds the Australian born, London based producer Teneil Throssell stretching well beyond big room fireworks. The confidence tracks back to her story. Years in the booth at Brixton’s Phonox sharpened her instincts, and a BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix of the Year in 2018 telegraphed where she was headed. The album makes good on the promise, not by getting louder, but by getting stranger and more intimate.

You can hear those instincts in the title track, a gleaming collaboration with Jon Hopkins that feels like light flooding a warehouse at 6 a.m. The build is patient. Pads glow, percussion girds itself, and then the whole thing opens. It is dance music with a devotional streak, the kind of tune you file away for that one moment in a set when you want to shift the room’s temperature. HAAi has always talked about texture as much as tempo, and that care for texture runs through the record.

Purple Jelly Disc is the one that most club kids will cite. It hammers, but never feels blunt. The synths smear like wet paint, the kick lurches, and tiny details ping around your headphones. You can sense a lifetime of crate digging in how she crossfades influences. There is a bit of gabber thump, a bit of shoegaze haze, a flirtation with trance stabs and UK bass pressure. Nothing sits flat. The tracks wobble and surge, like living things.

A lot of dance albums hit a wall when they try to translate club logic into a living room listen. Baby, We’re Ascending sneaks around that problem by letting songs breathe. HAAi’s sense of melody is stronger than her reputation suggests. Even when the drums are chewing the floor, she threads in glassy motifs and half-buried vocals that stick. It helps that the record plays like a journey, not a playlist. The pacing is savvy, the peaks earned, the valleys warm and a little weird. You can tell these pieces were stress tested at gigs, then sanded down in the studio.

HAAi’s backstory peeks through in the edges. Before the booths and festivals, she played in the psychedelic outfit Dark Bells, and there is a lingering love for noise and reverb here. It is not nostalgia. It is a toolkit. She drags those textures into a dance context, then slices them until they shimmer. The result feels modern and personal, a take on techno that carries its own handwriting.

This is also a record that rewards a real system. If you are the kind of listener who obsesses over pressings, the Baby, We’re Ascending vinyl is a smart pickup. The low end breathes, hats sit bright but not brittle, and the title cut blossoms on a decent setup. Folks chasing HAAi vinyl or looking to buy HAAi records online will find this one holds up to repeat spins. I have seen it flying out of the bins at my local shop, and I get why. It is versatile, with club weapons and late night keepers in the same sleeve. If you are browsing a Melbourne record store or hunting through vinyl records Australia listings, this is a safe bet. It also plays nicely alongside Mute label mates on the shelf, which is a shallow reason to buy a record, but record people know that joy.

Critical response backed the vibe that fans were already feeling. The album drew strong praise across electronic press for its scale and heart, and for the way HAAi pulled pop-adjacent hooks into rave architecture. None of that would matter if it did not move bodies. It does. Yet it also offers quiet moments that make you look up from your phone and actually listen, which is rarer than it should be.

Debuts often try to be everything at once. This one feels like a clear statement from an artist who already burned through a thousand hours in the booth and knows where she stands. Baby, We’re Ascending is full of lift, but it does not float away. It is rooted in the room, sweat on the floor, bass in your ribs. If you are building a stack of HAAi albums on vinyl, start here. It is the foundation for a catalog that seems set to keep surprising, a reminder that club music can carry both weight and wonder when the right hands are at the controls.