Moby – Future Quiet

When Moby releases a new album, it could be anything from hardcore dance music to electro ballads about animal rights, or a 90-minute recording of the musician doing his ironing. Since his 1996 classic Play became ubiquitous across adverts and nature documentaries, the electronic artist has pursued a mix of increasingly earnest musical directions, whether it’s his post-punk Moby and The Void Pacific Choir projects (including 2017’s More Fast Songs About the Apocalypse) or lengthy ambient soundscapes (such as 2016’s four-hour record Long Ambients 1: Calm. Sleep.). Were it not for the highly descriptive nature of his record titles, you would not necessarily know what genre to expect until pressing play.

As the name suggests, his latest release, Future Quiet, falls on the ambient side of his musical personality. It contains 85 minutes of largely drumless, piano-led minimalist music, with only occasional vocals and even less variety. It opens with a reworked version of When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die, the closing track on 1995’s Everything Is Wrong, which gained a new audience on TikTok after being featured heavily in Stranger Things. This might seem a cynical move from anyone other than Moby, who frequently revisits his back catalogue (the recent albums Reprise and Resound NYC featured orchestral arrangements of his older songs), and often donates proceeds to animal and human rights charities.

The album is more emotionally direct than some of his ambient recordings, demonstrating his knack for chords that tug on the heartstrings. The synths and strings on Retreat build in aching intensity to the brink of bursting, and the producer indulges his Erik Satie-esque side on minimalist piano piece Ruhe. On Air (Quiet Future) offers a rare brush with percussion that whispers beneath Serpentwithfeet’s wistful vocals (“It’s been a minute since I’ve seen you smile…”), while Moby’s own quivering voice is featured on the lament This Was Never Meant For Us.

While all of a piece, it is a long time to spend wallowing in melancholy, with deliberately little distinction from track to track. The closest Future Quiet gets to upbeat is on Mott St 1992, which has skipping drums and cascading vocal samples over simple piano chords, and the album could do with more moments like this to break up some of Moby’s more meandering monotony. And though there is always a shimmer of hope in his lush arrangements, after a while, you become numb to its emotional qualities and can get on with folding your laundry.