Daniel Avery’s Tremor Vibrates Between Rock and Rave

In 2013, Daniel Avery arrived like a comet. Drone Logic, his debut album, didn’t just introduce a new voice in techno—it detonated one. It was the sound of someone prying open the circuitry of the dancefloor to let light and air pour in: acid basslines dissolving into vaporous melodies, club beats that pulsed less for hedonism than transcendence. A decade later, Avery is no longer the wide-eyed Fabric resident dabbling in hardware hypnosis. With Tremor, his sixth solo record, he trades the isolation of the producer’s booth for the unpredictable friction of collaboration, stepping closer to the rock lineage that’s haunted his music all along.

Avery’s work has always carried a ghost of guitars—an echo of distortion behind the drone. Before he was a mainstay in London’s club scene, he was a teenager in Bournemouth playing Nine Inch Nails and Deftones between electroclash cuts at a local indie night. His early mentors, Erol Alkan and the late Andrew Weatherall, taught him that rock and rave weren’t opposites—they were siblings, both born from sweat and circuitry. Tremor feels like the culmination of that education: an album that blurs the boundaries between shoegaze, post-punk, and techno until they melt into one thick, emotional blur.

The guest list alone reads like a map of Avery’s interior world: Alison Mosshart of The Kills, Walter Schreifels of Quicksand and Rival Schools, the ethereal yeule, and the restless yunè pinku. Together, they inhabit a landscape that’s unmistakably Avery’s—acid-tinged, metallic, shimmering with static—but also unmistakably human. The machines no longer lead; they respond.

“Neon Pulse” opens the record like a mirage, all synthetic choir and cinematic swell, before dissolving into the crisp breakbeats of “Rapture in Blue.” Cecile Believe’s vocals hover in the fog, not so much singing as exhaling. Guitars begin to emerge on “Haze” and “A Silent Shadow,” where bdrmm bring a full-band intensity that threatens to crack Avery’s polished veneer. The tension is delicious: you can feel him pulling back, then giving in, as though wrestling with his own instinct for control.

There’s a DJ’s logic to Tremor—each track feeding into the next, tension mounting and releasing in slow motion. But midway through, on “A Moon Starts Shaking,” Avery interrupts his own ascent. The track is lush, meditative, beautiful—and maybe too much so. The momentum falters, like a dancer stepping outside for air only to realize the night has moved on without them.

Avery once described his taste as “music that sounds unreal,” and Tremor hums with that same uncanny electricity. The standout moments are the ones where human and machine blur beyond recognition: Mosshart’s voice smeared across the muddy groove of “Greasy Off the Racing Line,” yeule’s fragile coo dissolving into static on “Higher,” Schreifels shouting into a void of fuzz on “In Keeping (Soon We’ll Be Dust).” The latter track detonates into glorious distortion before its remnants float into the title track—a vapor trail that refuses to settle.

The album’s final stretch finds Avery circling back toward light. “A Memory Wrapped in Paper and Smoke” drifts like a satellite reentering orbit, referencing the cinematic grace of the opener, while “I Feel You,” featuring Art School Girlfriend, ends the record on a radiant crescendo. It’s Avery’s classic closing gesture: a final, ecstatic lift-off that collapses into silence just before you expect the beat to drop.

Tremor isn’t about mastery—it’s about surrender. Where Drone Logic found beauty in precision, Tremor finds it in collapse. The record quivers between worlds: rock and rave, control and chaos, the body and the void. Avery doesn’t just invite others into his sound—he lets them rearrange it. What’s left is something imperfect, haunted, and alive.

For an artist once defined by seamless transitions, Tremor feels like a deliberate fracture. It shakes, hums, and, true to its name, never quite holds still.