This week sees the release of Cosmin TRG‘s new album, Gordian. 

The Romanian producer’s discography reads like a who’s who of celebrated contemporary dance labels – Hemlock, Hessle Audio, Rush Hour – but in recent years he’s settled with Modeselektor’s 50Weapons stable, who released TRG’s debut album Simulat in 2011. Whereas TRG’s early releases touched on dubstep, grime and more, Simulat was pretty straight-up techno – led by the razor-edged, Plastikman-esque single ‘De Dans’.

Gordian references the Gordian Knot, a metaphor for an “impossible” problem that’s solved by means so simple that you’d never think of them (read: cutting the rope rather than disentangling the knot), and TRG ties (ahem) this to the “very contemporary, impossible task of discerning between real and replicated, authentic and contrived … Coping with facts, objects and bodies, the necessity of ‘making it’, fear of failure [and] fear of ‘not being happy’”. Appropriately, it’s a more longing listen than Simulat, and features some of TRG’s prettiest music to date. You can stream it in full below.