Wax Tailor is a producer from France who has been releasing music for nearly two decades. Over that time, he’s garnered a reputation as a musician who has brought orchestral grandeur and trip hop together into one cohesive style, often releasing albums that feel cinematic in nature, featuring a number of noteworthy guests. His most recent album, The Shadow of Their Suns, came out in 2021. Now he’s back with another full-length album, Fishing For Accidents.

Sometimes when an artist has been around as long as Wax Tailor has, you don’t need them to reinvent themselves each time out, you just need them to do what they do well. And that’s exactly what you’re getting with Fishing For Accidents. He’s hitting all the familiar notes, but everything sounds really good and it’s fun to listen to, so you don’t necessarily care all that much. There are funky drums, warm bass lines, and orchestral samples that will overwhelm you with emotion, all giving way to a myriad of excellent guest artists to take the album in different directions, all of them engaging and interesting. The roster hits on a lot of different styles, with Kuf Knotz, Victoria Bigelow, Mattic, Ill Conscious, David Bars, Voice Monet, Iojii, Jennifer Charles, and Mick Jenkins, all getting a chance to shine and add their own unique flavor to the mix. In less experienced hands, this might have gotten a little messy of disconnected, but Wax Tailor has been doing this long enough to know how to bring an artist in and marry their styles together in a way that is unique to that project and form a cohesive sound for the whole album. He makes it sound effortless this far into his career, but it’s not an easy task to pull off.

Fishing For Accidents is yet another incredibly solid album from Wax Tailor. It delivers that cinematic trip hop that you’ve come to expect from him, but with different flavors coming through as he shakes up his list of collaborators and makes it all work.