If there’s one constant for the UK’s Wisdom Teeth label, it’s a restless, shape-shifting sensibility. They named the thing after growth, for Christ’s sake. Over a decade, they’ve crawled across the genre waveform like a sluggish progress bar, jettisoning early dubstep for some sort of unholy bass-techno hybrid, then hyper-focusing on narrowly bounded experiments—the wiggly $100\text{ BPM}$ terrain, or the quick-stepping $150-170$ zone.
Then there’s co-founder K-LONE (aka Josiah Gladwell). He’s the anchor. He’s the stoic sculptor hunched over the same damn block of milky marble for three albums straight. Cape Cira (2020) and Swells (2023) established the rigid Gladwellian tenets: luminous synths, razor-sharp drums, and harmonic elements with a suggestive, physical heft (mallets! wheezing organs!). His percussion, bless its heart, is almost aggressively unassuming—it suggests the light glancing off a burnished hi-hat, not the force of a drumstick.
His new one, sorry i thought you were someone else, on NYC’s Incienso, is of a piece with his past work—supersaturated with color and driven by those finely honed drums. But despite avoiding any major stylistic leaps, it’s the most satisfying record of his career. The textures are softer, more enveloping. The emotional spectrum has finally expanded beyond that previous demure glow. This lushness feels almost contrary, given that Wisdom Teeth’s recent output was dedicated to minimal techno, and K-LONE’s been gabbing about his love for the minimal revival in interviews (shout out to Incienso co-founder Anthony Naples, an acolyte in the same church). But peer beneath the billowing pads, and the album’s deceptively streamlined nature snaps into focus: tracks are built on the stingiest boom-ticking patterns; basslines operate by suggestion, sketching a few sternum-taps before plunging back into the subsonic abyss; and every element is polished and set like a jewel in a tiny, subdued mechanism, masking the actual minimal movement beneath the hood. The album is ridiculously consistent. Sparkling chimes, swollen sub-bass, and spoken-word ghosts flit across the stereo field. His drums are more refined than ever—bursts of hissing static or sculpted white noise, echoing minimal titans like Matthew Herbert but set against the aquamarine chords of a Pépé Bradock. He uses dub delay sparingly, sending sounds ricocheting into maze-like expanses just out of earshot.
Gladwell’s consistency is so thorough you suspect he could recombine his parts at will—the drum groove of “slk” with the chords of “sslip”—and the result would be functionally identical. That’s not a diss; it’s a testament to his focused ideas: “slide by side” is a pointillist masterpiece, every sound (nubby bass, blippy woodblocks, a honey-drip topline) is arranged with the casual-yet-careful precision of a Zen garden. “sslip” flashes back to the heyday of Force Trax with its monochromatic chords, only to inject the insouciance of Chicago ghetto house with a tinny vocal sample. “someone else,” the obvious highlight, builds a mesmerizing opener around a downcast vocal sample and chords that burble like a fountain. Even tracks with barely a hook (“gurgle” toggles between two bass notes) are palimpsests of filigreed details and murmuring voices. The mixing on “someone else” is so masterful that every sound bobs in the mix like marshmallows in Jell-O. sorry i thought you were someone else strikes a rare affective note: quick-stepping yet subdued, keyed for amped-up dancefloors but perfectly suited for watching the sunrise from your apartment window. This ambivalence, perhaps, is rooted in the death of his father—the backdrop to its creation. Yet it is never maudlin. It’s shot through with a palpable sense of hope and clear-headed spirit. Some dance music shouts at you. K-LONE’s invites you to get cozy with your feelings.
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