Joe Armon-Jones is a keyboardist/producer from London who is part of Ezra Collective, but he’s also been building quite a career outside of the group as well, creating solo albums, collaborative albums, and just contributing to albums by other artists, such as Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, and Ego Ella May, just to name a few. Starting in 2017, he started working with producer/multi-instrumentalist Maxwell Owin, and they dropped their first album together, Idiom. They have continued to both work on multiple projects since that time, but the question became when they were finally going to follow that album up. Well, the wait is finally over, as the duo now delivers their new album, Archetype.

While other projects these two work on might sway more heavily to jazz, or maybe neo-soul and R&B, Archetype is a different type of project all together. Armon-Jones is a brilliant keyboardist in the traditional sense, but tradition is being thrown out the window on this album. There are a few moments here and there where you get a glimpse of his virtuosity, but this album is really about Armon-Jones and Owin taking all these different genres and subgenres of music and blending them together into something new and different, challenging listeners ears along the way. Over the course of the album, we touch on everything from grime to dubstep to garage to drum and bass to hip hop to jazz to R&B and beyond. There are large swathes of the album that are really experimental and not at all pop friendly, but there are also moments, especially with guest artists like O the Ghost, Rocks FOE, Fatima, Mala, Marysia, YUIS, Lex Amor, and Shabaka Hutchings where it leans back the other way and it feels more in line with a project like Gorillaz. The similarities end there, though, because the moments without the guest artists are where Armon-Jones and Owin press the pedal to the metal and take you through this wild sonic journey where you never quite know where the music is going to land. As a result, it’s an album that you definitely want to listen to from start to finish, let it soak in for a minute, and then run it right back, because there are definitely musical gems that you missed the last time through.

When you’re going to take this long in between projects together, you want to make it count. The good news from Joe Armon-Jones and Maxwell Owin is that they definitely made the most of their time working together, pushing boundaries, defying expectations, and just having fun with it. Archetype is for those listeners who are looking for something new and challenging, that doesn’t sound like anything else out right now.