Georg Grosz - Restricted (2026)

Georg Grosz is Kagami Smile is Ryan Hill.

Let the VSTs ring out across the valleys, swallow me whole and spit me back up wholer. Where Kagami Smile tends to burn clean and bright — amped for those humid, ambient horizons — Restricted arrives under a different pall. If Kagami is horizon-gazing, widescreen and irradiated, then Georg Grosz feels fluorescent-lit and inward-facing: queasier, more coiled, twitching at the edges of the frame.

Restricted plays like weird contemporary outsider electronics sketched from a bound position — psychologically, socially, geographically. Hill, currently based in Shenzhen, channels that sense of constriction into the album’s architecture. You can hear it in the way the tracks seem to press against invisible walls: loops cycling with nervous insistence, synth lines cramped into tight corridors, percussion patterns that shuffle but never quite break into open stride. It’s club-adjacent in the way Actress often is — those sly, side-eyed rhythmic displacements — but here they feel more boxed-in, as if the groove is being tested in a room with no exits.

There’s a deliberate scuffedness to the surfaces. Crude-but-cute sequencing rubs up against synth presets pushed past their polite limits. DAWs sound like they’re running on fumes and glue, timelines slightly buckled, MIDI data smeared at the edges. The charm lies in that abrasion: plasticky leads wobbling against corroded low-end, brittle drum hits clipped to within an inch of collapse. It’s playful, but with a fever underneath.

Moments of uneasy levity peek through — synthetic melodies that feel almost naive, like demo-mode lullabies — before being swallowed by a greyed-out ambience. Pads don’t so much bloom as stain the air. Negative space is used tactically, giving the impression of surveillance or withheld breath. Even when the tracks hint at lift-off, they remain tethered, circling in place like drones caught in bureaucratic airspace.

Georg Grosz is Kagami Smile is Ryan Hill. A triangulation of identities, perspectives and pressure points. Under the Grosz banner, Hill doesn’t aim for transcendence so much as endurance: electronics that twitch and persist in tight quarters, finding strange beauty in compression, and humour in the system’s hum.