Opening with the sonic equivalence of driving a Knight Rider-esque car down a midnight motorway in shades and a leather jacket, ‘Yearning’, the first track on Elisabeth Elektra’s sophomore album, burns rubber into a fully realised neon-tubed universe. ‘Boys & Girls’ ripples like molten metal. ‘Surround Me’ plunges the listener beneath that silver sea, the droning backing mimicking the deep, heady sound of being underwater, and ‘Desire’ has us emerging from the pool, wet and slo-mo, ready to dance.
The elaborate layering of synthesiser and vocals in Hypersigil is a refraction of light through a glass prism; at once you hear the bright focus of the white light and its spectral rainbow components, all cast iridescence into its surrounds. There is an inescapably 80s sheen to the production, but Elisabeth doesn’t fall into reminiscence or tribute; her lyrical content anchors the album to modernity – sometimes even to a science fiction future (“I’d fracture time and space just to be with you”).
Alongside the synthetic glossiness are elements both defiantly natural and supernatural. Elisabeth describes the album as “a spell of liberation and expansion”; she calls upon the magical to assist in the release of human grief and angst. In ‘Unbreakable’ she sings “I alchemised this anger into gold by writing this tonight”. This “liberation and expansion” is passed tenderly to the listener, a similar release found by simple exposure to the glittering synth and echoing reverberation of electronic drums.
Hypersigil is a wholly cohesive work – no track feels misplaced, each a differently-angled exploration of one electric space, each euphoric in its instrumentation. Even to non-believers, it’s difficult to argue a spell isn’t being cast, particularly as closing track ‘The Stars’ pans up to the open sky, comets alight and fireflies winking.
