By the time End Beginnings landed last week, the myth of Sandwell District was already half fossil, half flare. This is not a mere return but the reanimation of a fractured, aged, yet unmistakably alive sonic body. And if that body walks with a limp, it's one earned through a decade of silence, estrangement, and, most recently, grief.
The death of Juan Mendez, the artist and producer known as Silent Servant, hangs over the album as its gravitational center. It shapes the sound, structure, and even the title—taken from an unfinished visual work Mendez had begun before his untimely death in January 2024. In all earnestness, Mendez was Sandwell District's connective tissue and stylistic conscience. He lent sonic, visual, and philosophical cohesion as it evolved from the shadowy outgrowth of Birmingham's integral Downwards imprint into a proper transatlantic phenomenon. From the minimalist aesthetics to the fanzine-like packaging of their debut album Feed-Forward (2010), Mendez helped turn Sandwell District into an iconic (and anti-iconic) collective, shunning identity yet ultimately becoming one.
Their philosophy—staunchly anti-celebrity and rigorously aesthetic—always placed form above function. Even at their peak, Sandwell District remained cryptic, pressing music to vinyl with scant context and eschewing profiles and press. In many ways, they picked up where Drexciya left off, subverting techno's rising commercialism with seditionary innovation cloaked in ambiguity.
Released at the dawn of the last decade, Feed-Forward remains a high watermark in industrial-influenced techno. Its discipline was relentless, near-monastic. Looped to the edge of repetition, full of spartan menace and metallic decay, it redrew the deep techno map by pulling it inward, making it stranger, darker, and more immersive. That the group would fracture under the weight of its mythos only deepened its legend, with artists from Daniel Avery to Blawan tracing a lineage to Sandwell’s bleak, loop-driven futurism.
What, then, to make of End Beginnings? As its paradoxical title suggests, it is more reckoning than sequel. Recorded primarily by current Sandwell members Regis and Function (Original SD member, Female does not feature) and aided by a cadre of collaborators, including Rrose, Rivet, Mønic, and Sarah Wreath, the album's eight tracks arc through mourning and motion. The beats are there, but they don’t insist; it's the space between them that matters more.
The opening track, Dreaming, begins with a whisper. Rather than building, it accumulates with a syncopated beat lurking beneath the sound of machinery trying and failing to achieve liftoff—techno through dream logic, where everything happens slightly out of joint. By the time this accumulation dissolves, you won't be sure if you’ve been led somewhere new or left behind entirely.
On Self-Initiate, a low, insistent hum acts like a voltage line drawn across the mix, pulsing but never exploding. Where Feed-Forward trafficked in overwhelming force, tracks like this show that End Beginnings understands the dignity of restraint, remaining content in haunting listeners over accosting them.
The most haunted place is Will You Be Safe? A mid-album jolt with a rhythm drunk on dissonance. Skipping and swaying before locking into place with hypnagogic focus, its submerged voices flicker beneath the beat like ghosts in the machine. It's the record's most kinetic moment and most emotionally fraught. Like Vatican Shadow in a moment of emotional collapse, the track propels through fragmentation and unease. But the album doesn’t stay submerged in dread. As it unfolds, club-ready motion tentatively returns.
Restless jitters with agitation. Its skittering electronics and crisp percussive hits suggest the directionless motion of untapped energy before resolving into a swirl of subdued acceptance. Hidden then draws from early techno’s motorik spirit through acid loops and haunted propulsion, not unlike the lonelier corners of Planetary Assault Systems.
Tracks like Least Travelled stretch beyond the confines of club utility, adding guitar textures and creating grains of organic warmth in an otherwise metallic environment. Elsewhere, Citrinitas Acid nods to classic electro, albeit laced with the subtle esotericism of its alchemical title. With a retrofuturist squelch underscored by a highly hummable melody, its feel is like the cautious remembrance of a smile after a funeral.
Finally, there is The Silent Servant, the spare, skeletal, almost motionless closer. There are no melodies, only atmospheres. There is no crescendo, only breath. In its six-minute span, Sandwell District mourns with intimacy, saying goodbye to their friend by letting the absence sound. The silence recalls the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, where nothing moves but everything lingers, and absence becomes a medium for the sacred.
There is a clear symmetry to End Beginnings. It echoes Feed-Forward without mimicking it and expands its language without betraying it. In many ways, it is a quieter, more contemplative album–post-traumatic techno, perhaps. But it's also more vulnerable. Where Sandwell District's earlier work was austere to the point of opacity, this new material allows for cracks of human intrusion. It lets in light. Diffused, flickering, and hesitant, yes, but light nonetheless.
