Lindstrøm: Everyone Else Is a Stranger review – minor variations on sleek space disco pleasures
Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is nothing if not consistent. The Norwegian electronic producer is known for his romantic, cosmic take on disco: along with his countrymen Todd Terje and Prins Thomas, he helped popularise a sleek, euphoric form that felt novel in the mid-2000s, and which is now the defacto soundtrack of every hip beachside bar the world over. Once in a while, Lindstrøm will make a left-field, exploratory record before snapping back to the space disco that made him famous.
Everyone Else Is a Stranger, his first album since the 2020 Prins Thomas collab III, represents the snap-back point: it’s a suite of four gloriously starry-eyed dance epics, filled with cheeky synth whirrs and undulating bass rhythms. It has all the enthusiastic fizz and enticing hue of a £30 bottle of pét nat; although it’s slightly less exciting than the seductive, moonlit III, it arrives at the perfect point of summer, when the heat is gruelling and the only thing that might help you cool down is 40 minutes of expansive synth jams.
The first half of Everyone Else begins as you’d expect – heady, fastbuilding, glamorous – but in the latter half, Lindstrøm pulls away from crowdpleasing into thornier territory. The Rind starts as a rhythmic, floor-filling groove before growing into a chaotic, panicky synth maelstrom. It sets the scene for the title track, a minimalist, ambient odyssey that by its end seems of a piece with the funky guitarled compositions of III. It feels like a twist ending, although not one that’s unearned or unwelcome – instead, it’s proof there may be more to Lindstrøm’s familiar rhythms than meets the ear.