SAINT ETIENNE

I’ve Been Trying To Tell You (HEAVENLY)

Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs’s curated comps for the Ace label have long betrayed a keen ear for period detail, but while those sets chiefly focused on the ’60s and ’70s, their latest reunion with Sarah Cracknell conceptually recaptured the late ’90s; a neglected cultural era between Labour’s 1997 victory and 9/11. The results were way too smart to be orthodox nostalgia: a dream-like series of near-ambient epiphanies that relocated hauntology in a new era.

Standout track:

Little K