After five years of releasing EPs and singles across a raft of labels including Argon, Ramp, and his own Signal Life, Finnish producer Desto returns to Rwina to deliver his first full-length album, Emptier Streets. As with his previous releases on the Dutch label, Desto strips the music back to its bare-bones essentials, fulfilling the album's title with a sound that's spacious and eerie, bleak and punishing, yet still offers warmth in its apparent coldness. Stylistically, the album is most obviously aligned with the aesthetics of Dirty South hip-hop and the dubstep diaspora, deploying booming drums, rolling hats, cold synthetic melodies, and voices inside cavernous sonic landscapes. You can feel a cinematic quality on "Dislocated City," where a simple interplay between pitched kick drums and modulated melodies is all it takes to create a hypnotic vibe. The title-track features a rare use of vocals, stuttered and effected into something alien, set against icy melodies on a solid bed of bass kicks and syncopated snares. "Glottal Stops" plays with a slightly disturbing melody made of guttural sounds over a relentless kick assault while "4 A.M." starts old school before switching into one of the album's most anthemic productions. "Drainpipe" shows off Desto's ability to pull emotions from the listener even without any drums, winding things down before "Healing" closes the album with one last energetic run through the city. Emptier Streets takes the sound Desto has been building for the past few years to its logical conclusion.
