Shelter

The 12-inch starts on a bone-chilling note with the titular track, a spartan warm-up that’s a creeping bass on the low end, wispy pads in the mids, and a scratchy looped vox sample on top designed to haunt your dreams. A freaky intro that unnerves as it allures. On the move now, Mark burrows deeper into a hypnotic groove with Shelter, a midtempo cyborg cut, half round, warm, organic percussion, half cold-tothe-touch synth chord sustains. The energy and urgency feels like new territory, but the execution is signature Mark E. On the reverse is a pair of more melodious tunes, the shuffling cyberpunk groove that is M-54, then the prickly Shinkansen, which has a sputtered and bleary-eyed thrust to make feet jitter and hips shake. A twist on the man's disciplined studio workmanship that we've come to know—arrow-straight arrangements, celery-crisp drums—that’s spiced with a few pinches of psychedelic, inside-out wickedness, devilishness to keep you wired, buzzing.