Max Syedtollan - Disposables (2023)

Morbid gimmicks, throwaway polaroids, creaking piles of last season’s rubbish – Max Syedtollan rakes through the detritus on Disposables, his new album for 33-33.

Languishing in the opiated wake of a freak accident (awaiting major surgery for a shattered radial head) Syedtollan confronted tedium with a reinvention of his artistic process, a sprawling and unhinged stylistic U-turn that casts aside classical intricacies in favour of a homemade, back-to-basics approach the composer terms “decomposition”.

Across these twelve tracks, such musical staples as metre and key are subverted or ignored; with Syedtollan’s new method functioning as a form of creativity through refusal. Scuppered toy electronics punctuate derealised blasts of daytime radio; diaristic snippets mutate into hallucinatory psychonarratives. It’s a singularly fucked up offering, like The Shadow Ring meets This Heat – while at the same time, apparently, Max Syedtollan’s ‘pop album’.

But it’s yet to be seen if Disposables will make any Radio 1 playlists – these are anti-songs that chart the psychedelic mundanities of recovery. Things get pretty dark, but there are lols to be had amid the narcotic gloom. There are even moments of almost beauty. It’s a trip; and Max Syedtollan plays the companionable if slightly worse-for-wear trip sitter.