Alex Zhang Hungtai - Divine Weight (2018)

Alex Zhang Hungtai (f.k.a. Dirty Beaches) frankly takes our breath away with Divine Weight; a sublime, spine-freezing suite of weightless, beat-less sax compositions uncannily resembling ambient synth and organ works. AOTY?

From Taipei via Canada and now based in Portugal, Hungtai brings a worldly wealth of experience to Divine Weight, which unfolds at an opiated pace with some of the lushest smoke curl dynamics we’ve had the pleasure of huffing in this year so far.

Only his 2nd solo LP under his own name, following an acclaimed stretch of Dirty Beaches releases and last year's incredible Love Theme set, Divine Weight keens with a supernatural metaphysics from the disturbed air of Pierrot, its lead single, to jaw-dropping choral percolations in Matrimony, before really blinding us with the curdled dissonance of This Is Not My Country - proper lump-in-throat material - and a coruscating vignette Yasumatei, before the committing the ultimate payload of Divine Weight, where all those ideas rise to the occasion in a magisterial swell of affective harmonics that’s reducing us to tears right now.