Spirals of blaring noise echo as though chained to the bottom of some long-forgotten cistern. A voice, far removed from normal diction, barks syllables in a harsh, lurching cadence. What remains of regular meter exists only as a log of controlled chaos—fetid, cavernous rhythms that batter a crumbling foundation. It all sounds ready to break apart. British producer Blawan holds it together on “The GL Lights,” the opening track of SickElixir. He extracts techno from within dense strata of mechanized grit, maneuvering through sharp edges and switchbacks until the mangled frame contorts into a new picture. The aesthetic is startling; his corroded dance music, steeped in hellish glossolalia, conjures a vast, violent, and unknowable world.

It hasn’t always been like this. When charting his development, the artist born Jamie Roberts recalls feverish after-school drum practice and a fascination with the metallic shrieks of an industrial mincer that soundtracked work as a maggot farmer in South Yorkshire. In his earliest releases, tidy post-dubstep singles for labels like the legendary Hessle Audio, this fascination manifested as mechanistic perfection: skeletal grooves dominated by surgically arranged percussion. As his experience grew, his work underwent a sea change. The beats became noisier, grittier, more organic, without compromising the slick arrangements. By the time of his first album, 2018’s Wet Will Always Dry, many of Roberts’ now-perennial fascinations were beginning to calcify: “Tasser,” for instance, propelled its eroded techno pulse forward with a throaty digital rasp. A new poetics of distortion was taking shape.

Seven years on, the leering, all-encompassing grime of SickElixir melds dozens of Roberts’ subsequent discoveries and revelations into a brutish, unhinged gestalt; its clamorous swagger makes “Tasser” look like a curio. Tracks groan and caterwaul as though wounded, cataloging a vast library of scabbed-over synth leads and guttural vocal hooks. The sound rides an uncanny middle between the scratchy, live-wire jam sessions of Syclops and the kitschy throat-singing augments of Ummet Ozcan. Roberts operates with finesse, finding a distinct place in the mix for each element in his tapestry. The yo-yoing volume dynamics in lead single “NOS”—from ruthless, blown-out bass to a clipped whisper—are at once organic and painstakingly contrived, compressing opposed timbres into a continuous, unified eruption.

Strange and indecipherable voices dot the album’s scorched landscape. Sibilance becomes a weapon on “Casch,” where the hissing -sch of the title lingers as a reedy film that coats the track like nuclear residue. “WTF” uses aggressive pitch correction to mold its vocals into a stringy, propulsive bassline that pulls and snaps across the stereo field, transmogrified to taut elastic. Roberts’ multivalent production chops turn the listening experience into a demented guessing game: Is the whole album, as the riff-y, Bobby McFerrin-referencing title of “Don’t Worry We Happy” might suggest, an a capella project that got out of hand? Is this kick drum, that synth, that snare merely another vocal fricative turned sideways and run through Blawan’s expansive stable of effects? SickElixir is compelling enough to render such questions immaterial: Its technique is swallowed whole by its form.

When unqualified beauty appears amid the album’s grotesqueries, it’s canted at odd angles, wrung from ear-searing hysterics. As the bubbling throb of “Rabbit Hole” cedes to plush vocals from singer Monstera Black, the resulting atmosphere feels almost alien in its charm; the album’s gnarled universe seems to shiver and glitch before snapping back into place on the next track. Such small spots of light can only accentuate darkness, and SickElixir’s shadow is deep and unrelenting. The album’s knotted speech collages familiar sounds into a kinetic slurry of semantic satiation, near-words repeated until they disintegrate. The abstracted language becomes a parodic lingua franca, a means to coagulate clashing textures. Knife in hand, Roberts proposes the most elegant solution available to separate signal from noise: cut deeper.