Wax Tailor is a producer from France that has been making music for roughly twenty years now. After keeping up a fairly steady pace from the mid ‘00s to the mid ‘10s, it’s now bean five years since his last album, By Any Beats Necessary. Now the wait is finally over as he presents his latest full-length album, The Shadow of Their Suns.

Sometimes when an artist is taking their time in between albums, you might want to see them do something different or show some sort of discernable growth, something to justify the prolonged absence. Sometimes, though, all it takes is an artist coming back from a hiatus and doing what they do and doing it really well to make you forget how long they’ve been away. That’s how I feel about The Shadow of Their Suns. There’s nothing all that unusual about the album if you’ve spent time with previous releases like By Any Beats Necessary or Dusty Rainbow From the Dark. Wax Tailor is building these experimental cinematic beats from orchestral samples and vintage recordings and making them sound like some of the grandest boom bap you’ve ever heard. There’s always this underlying tinge of eeriness to his albums, but at the same time, when it comes to dropping a single, he can certainly make a song that just straight up slaps. On this particular album, you definitely get a couple of standout singles that will make you want to turn the stereo up, namely “Everybody,” featuring Del the Funky Homosapien and Mr. Lif, and “Keep it Movin,” featuring D Smoke. More than anything, though, Wax Tailor once again shows us what it means to have a steady hand as a producer/arranger/composer, not just developing each song individually to take you on a journey, but carefully sequencing the album so that you are expertly guided from these more experimental and moody introspective songs to these really big over-the-top numbers and back again without ever missing a beat.

It’s good to have Wax Tailor back, and The Shadow of Their Suns feels so familiar that it seems like he never went away. He uses his veteran know how to guide us on this musical journey that balances this grand orchestral instrumental music that might get a little avantgarde with some hip hop that will deliver a funky good time. It’s an album that you can keep listening to and discovering something new each time through.