The return nobody dared take for granted, and one of the most welcome comebacks in British electronic music. Released in 2018, Monsters Exist is Orbital's ninth studio album and their first in five years, arriving at a moment when the world felt as strange and unsettling as any in living memory, and finding Phil and Paul Hartnoll with plenty to say about it. The album draws a direct line from the brothers' pre-rave squat-punk roots through the acid house explosion that gave the band their name, taking their inspiration from the M25 orbital motorway that served as the central nervous system of the early rave scene in South East England, all the way forward to the volatile, erratic political landscape of the late 2010s. Where their previous album Wonky had leaned into abstraction and experimentation, Monsters Exist is a more classically structured Orbital record, recognizable and immediate without ever being predictable, the work of a duo who understand instinctively how to balance dancefloor function with genuine emotional and intellectual substance. The result is an album that bristles with anxiety and dark humor in equal measure, channeling the chaos of the contemporary political moment into the kind of urgent, kinetic electronic music that has always been Orbital's most powerful mode. Tense, melodic, and shot through with the warmth and intelligence that has made them one of the most beloved acts in the history of British dance music, Monsters Exist is proof that some bands only get better with age.
