It’s been ten years since Ben Frost’s third record, A U R O R A, released: ten years of, several times a year, ending up getting half-cut (if not drunk) and listening to this extremely loud. It’s what God (Ben) intended, I feel. And to answer the question pre-emptively: yes, I currently am.

I did cover this in 2014, and it’s hard now to know how to approach this record on its decennial, framed such as it is in a slew of half-remembered melancholic nights, released and first heard by a different man that sits here now. Somehow everything has changed, somehow nothing has. Yet I sit here again, choosing to reflect on my past and all its complications, as well as my future in all of its pains.

A U R O R A has always stood out to me as slightly different in Ben’s catalogue, by far his biggest and most percussive work. Its predecessor, By The Throat, is an icily threatening but fairly slow moving juggernaut: it’s successor The Centre Cannot Hold prods and stabs in targeted political jabbing. Here there’s no nuance, no subtlety, only the night and a collection of impulsive tunes that sound like they could have been recorded at a cyberpunk artificial rainforest gig during the nuclear holocaust.

I want to talk about two tracks here in particular which have stood out to me over the years, and doubtless others as well: “Nolan” and “Secant”. These have always been an idiosyncratic pair, my go-tos, the perfect embodiment of A U R O R A‘s dystopian jungle nightclub aesthetic. Chasmic percussion rends the night open with heaving, nightmarish drums and abusive cymbals; synth lines scream in spotlight flare, all tortured halogen; and static walls of obliterated instrumentation churn turbulently in the heaving air. It is exorcism, catharsis, baptism.

They are also reflected in the equally calamitous closer “A Single Point Of Blinding Light”, which appears like some space laser fired from a distant orbital weapons system, carving the blackness in twain by a brief instant of feverish drums and radioactive synths.

Elsewhere, refrains set pauses into the destruction, appearing as glowing and humming interstitial moments that evoke images of batteries being recharged by some giant nuclear reactor. The likes of “No Sorrowing” regroups its energies in crescendo drones, all powerline humming climbing into the ultrasonic. Between “Nolan” and “Secant” sits “The Teeth Behind Kisses”, holding a little closer, simmering in blurry tones and subdued percussive taps. A bell tolls distantly, ominously chiding like a clucking tongue impatiently awaiting its turn in the dancefloor French Kiss.

In the 40 excoriating minutes of this record I’m taken somewhere else: not anywhere safe, lost as I am in the strobing Amazonian nightmare of its aggression as it stomps a leaden foot on the poor souls caught in front of the stage speakers. But I am taken inside, overwhelmed at first by its merciless assaults before being allowed to lose myself cathartically inside its fierce passions and energies to be vaporised anew.

A new 10th anniversary reissue of this record is now available so for newcomers I heartily recommend purchasing a copy, or for oldheads you already know what’s up and this is just a PSA of a classic album.