Korea Town Acid is a Toronto-based producer. She had been deejaying and performing live improvised electronic music sets for years before releasing the EP Mahogani Forest on Cosmic Resonance in 2018. She made her debut on URBNET last year with the release of her album *Metamorphosi*s. Now she’s right back with another full-length album, Cosmos.

One of the great joys of following a musician’s career is being able to witness the moment when they level up. A lot of the time, this tends to happen around the third album, as artists figure out how to synthesize different influences and get comfortable with the recording process and so on. On Cosmos, you can almost hear this confidence from the beginning of the album from Korea Town Acid, like she knows she has this. As you begin your journey, you might think you’re in for a straight ahead downtempo album. While she’s delivering some excellent and nuanced downtempo, as it turns out, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When you get to the third track, “Sakura,” the albums becomes wide open. KTA starts to fold in this drum and bass/jungle influence, giving you busier drums that inject the album with a boost of energy, which then gives way to this trip hop feel with an upright bass line being played against some off-kilter rhythms and eerie synth lines. From there, KTA is fluctuating between this downtempo homebase and other styles of hip hop and electronic music, moving flawlessly between boom bap, dub, house, and more. Where you can really get a sense of her skills as a live deejay is the way that she’s able to seamlessly transition between these tracks, creating a bridge between tempo and style switches so that everything flows together naturally and everything feels like its in conversation with the rest of the album. As a result, you get an album that really takes you on an emotionally journey as you go from some peaceful and gorgeous downtempo tracks to some frantic dance tracks to some challenging experimental tracks that fall somewhere in between.

Cosmos is a great next step for Korea Town Acid as she delivers her most ambitious and well-developed album to date. It’s challenging in its composition, but accessible as KTA synthesizes all of her influences and favorite styles of music and makes it all her own.