As part of an adult generation that can't remember a time without the internet, Eugene Hector's tracks are borne of a mind conditioned to consuming multiple media at once. So be warned: Journey With The Heavy will drive you insane if you pay too close attention to it. Often there is so much data processing stealthily beneath the surface that focusing on one element and excluding the others will totally re-wire the way your mind registers the prevailing beat. If you break the tracks down into simple components – bass, beats, melody (where applicable) – they're all scarily disconnected, yet somehow the scaffolding remains sturdy.

That's because each of these components feed, overlap, and ultimately fill the gaps for the others. '958' is the strangest track on the record: a series of abrupt sounds play out like some blazed morse code, staunchly cold and uninviting, until a snare hit proffers an olive branch. From there, the sounds coalesce into melody while a de-contextualised house vocal leaves a breadcrumb trail through the fray. Dro Carey never deigns to provide you enough context to label what you're hearing: the celebratory house voice is wedged so tightly between the beats that the sole lyric you can decipher – the sole word allowed to resonate and potentially contain meaning – is the word “sentimental”. But it sounds referential, or incidental: old, and nothing else.

Dro Carey - 'Talk Smak' by BOILER ROOM

The strangest thing about Journey With The Heavy is that, the more you listen to it, the less welcoming it becomes. Compared to his debut EP Venus Knock, many of these beats are simple 4/4s, and the initial impression is one of calm. But there's no empty space in Dro Carey's productions here: the mood is cloistered, suffocating, almost carnival-esque. The more you discover, the more you listen for, and so the more dizzying it becomes. 'Motorvibe' is the one exception, an oddly forgiving lapse into an amber, over-exposed reverie, but Dro Carey's real achievement here is his sculpting of a sound that is equal parts soothingly constant yet wickedly tangential. In this way, he's exactly the artist 2012 deserves, and this is his most essential record yet.

by Shaun Prescott