The walk to and from work is a short one but the various pavements in the neighbourhood make it more tiresome than it needs to be, and are more reminiscent of patchwork quilts than pathways at times. Even after years of living here you have to be a mildly attentive walker, divided and sub-divided such as it is with sections of replacement asphalt and cement following presumably decades of maintenance and installations.

This ragged arrangement of striated materials betrays a hidden underground lattice of pipes and cables that allow the existence of the modern urban sprawl. Gas pipes, electrical cables, sewerage and freshwater lines, fibre internet networks: all of it runs silently underfoot in a lattice essential to ensuring our connection to the invisible utility grid which joins us all to some monstrous, unfathomable domestic entity.

This is a mundane observation of a remarkable system that defines the modern world yet remains out of view, but that is the modern world isn’t it? A collection of technical, engineering achievements that have accumulated over time to the point where their wonder simply fades into the background of complacent existence, and which in their own strange way, begin to take on an invisible life of their own in the same way they have sightlessly transformed our world.

Tidal Memory Exo is a movement away from Iglooghost’s older works which felt a bit more bubblegum and saccharine: now we’re confronted with a much heavier urban soundscape. Still, with its staccato and choppy vocals, and ripping and rolling electronica it reminds me of the artificial ground we walk, in all its fragmentary transformations and quietly marvellous modernity.

Little of nature exists in TME, with the likes of stuttering “Alloy Flea” flickering under fluorescent painfulness, twisting and turning under arcane lyrics before pounding out pent up Drill basslines in a cathartic rush. Many tracks allude to some new trans-natural existence, with close sibling “Coral Mimic” creeping on sandpaper whisperings and steely synths, similar to later “Nemat0de” filled with scatterlings of twitching, bleeping tones and cruising Hip Hop beats. A subterranean world zips by as outlets and drain covers briefly illuminate our journey through this underworld.

“flux.Cocoon” makes reference to moths and transformation in amongst the other abstracted pieces of voice, splitting between male and female presenters in perhaps some tentative metaphor, its own pace and evolution snapping and cutting as it goes between floaty sequences and much harder bass. Out the door sophomore “New Species” pushes for change intensely, losing a hold of its grasp on reality as its tilts and turns uneasily, lost in its own labyrinthine pipework. Late term “Germ Chrism” sizzles in fiery and impassioned Hip Hop as it slams verses out urgently before imploding into dialtone-esque error bars scattering.

More reserved, downtempo moments do pepper the record with elegiac darkness that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Massive Attack album: “Spawn01 ft Cyst” is all low-key female breathiness and plodding Trip Hop consistency, floating over onyx synth beds. Later “Dewdrop Signal” brings a surprisingly reductive sequence as the record begins to recede, not so much running out of steam but rather sliding into something like acceptance as the bleakness of urbanity begins to flocculate around us.

Something skates below the surface of this album, a complicated allegory obfuscated by the abstruse lyrics and the flickering raving of its heady, club-ready instrumentation. A world that’s understood conceptually, but perhaps not known, a conversation waiting to be had, a future willing to emerge. It’s a big reckoning, but it’s ours.