In its opening moments, Blasé Saint seems easy to pigeonhole. “Lifelover” begins with the muted thump of a kick drum, a migrating flock of reversed percussion hits, and a keyboard line that sounds like an Angelo Badalamenti DX7 patch poached from some nerdy producer subreddit. Its palette, swaddled in an ASMR-ready mixture of cassette hiss and field recordings, gives “regulation dub techno.” But before you can get too comfortable, the song pulls you into its undertow; five minutes later, it spits you out in a wholly new place. Atonal loops bloom and fold into themselves, while the drums and synth, repeating on an infinite cycle, get subsumed by gigantic bass frequencies. It’s intense and impressive, dumping a familiar bag of tricks onto the table and rearranging them with fresh eyes and fast hands. Throughout the album, Matryoshka repeats that thorny approach, skewing familiar markers of various electronic genres just so to create an immersive, quietly transportive record.
The Seattle-based producer, born Jaqueline Lawson, displays the depth and confidence of a more seasoned artist across her slim catalog. Early cuts, like the nightmare club of 2024’s “lluvia erótica,” tread similar melted-plastic ground as some of SOPHIE’s transcendent, uncanny singles. Lawson’s work with Sferic labelmate Yungwebster and his Nostalgians crew draws inspiration from the most atmospheric moments of Travis Scott’s sound, sanding off the edges and infusing it with a soulful, foggy glow. Take Yungwebster’s “fantasize [reg+fast],” a highlight of his 2025 album II, for instance: Lawson’s beat is a narcotic beauty, its bleeping notes and tinny drums spiraling and dissipating like a sparkler on a misty night. She’s adept at identifying the beating heart in digital sounds, and Blasé Saint, her debut full-length, is a mostly spellbinding tour of Lawson’s knowledge and abilities.
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The slowly unfurling tones that blur at the edges hit all the marks of capital-A Ambient music, though the addition of beats keeps these songs more lively than vaporous. In less capable hands, these pieces could plod aimlessly and fade away, but Lawson knows how to wring complexity from a minimal set of elements. Her layered drum programming is intricate and well-defined, never overloading or crowding out any particular sound. Grooves often pivot around themselves: Halfway through “Surface Tension,” Lawson strips away an entire pattern, revealing the simple kick-snare motif beneath it all. The tempo remains steady, but takes on a softer, more contemplative posture, as if urging you to unclench your jaw. On “Jewelry Burns,” the shards of a drum-and-bass sequence and the delay on a slowly-morphing synth mirror each other, creating a satisfying rhythm that’s both halting and propulsive.
Blasé Saint falters when Lawson leans too formulaic. Its strongest song, “Where the Dancers Are Spinning,” has the metabolism of a hibernating animal, with its slightly dubby drums and square wave triplets oozing gracefully into the stereo field. About a minute in, a radiant drone fades up like morning sunlight spilling across a landscape. It’s positively blissful, the kind of music you could crawl inside and inhabit. But when she repeats this compositional method on closer “Lunar Tide Cycle,” it’s easy to think you’ve accidentally randomized the tracklist, dulling its once-ecstatic impact. More broadly, Lawson over-relies on staticky textures and bottomless reverb, occasionally washing the songs together and dragging the album under the weight of its vibes. But nothing fully sinks. Instead, these moments feel like Lawson diving into convention to see what’s below the surface, scanning the depths of her influences to learn what can be made anew.
