Actress Returns With 'Radical Frame', His Most Complete Statement Yet

Eighteen years on from his debut record, the DJ/producer proves he still cuts a singular shape.

Darren Cunningham doesn't do things the easy way, and that's precisely the point. Before Actress, there was a footballer from Wolverhampton, a DJ finding his feet in London, a painter and writer circling ideas that would eventually spill into sound. That winding, unlikely route is exactly how you end up somewhere genuinely new - and across more than ten albums, it's how Cunningham built one of the most distinctive discographies in British electronic music.

Now, eighteen years on from his 2007 debut 'Hazyville', he's back with 'Radical Frame', an album that plays like a summation of everything he's spent nearly two decades refining. The fractured rhythms, the miniature bursts of sound, the dancefloor heat filtered through static and half-glimpsed melody: it's all here, sharper and more assured than ever. CASISDEAD turns up on 'Live By You', and Preston's Rainy Miller adds another outsider's voice to the record's orbit.

Today brings 'Overchord', the album's centrepiece, released alongside its companion track 'Live By You' and a video from Anna van der Velde. The visual finds Cunningham locked inside a luxury prison entirely of his own construction: boxed in, but never boxed in creatively, which feels like the whole point.

If 'Radical Frame' has a thesis, it might be this: after building an entire language from scratch, Cunningham isn't just closing a chapter. He's handing the frame over, leaving space for whoever picks up where he's left off.