Speaking to Zane Lowe last year, Streten detailed his technique when working with rappers, one that involved overhauling the beat after they lay down their verses “so the whole piece of music fits the vocal like a glove.” He hasn’t always made good on that, given previous disjointed tracks with Vic Mensa and Pusha T. The stepped-on balloon squeaks and soda-can hiss of “Amber” also call to mind SOPHIE’s earliest music, offering further evidence of Streten’s ear turning toward pop’s relative fringes. SOPHIE’s idiosyncratic style seems to have had a more holistic effect on Hi This Is Flume, too-and not just in Flume and San Francisco producer Eprom’s superfluously amped-up “ Is It Cold in the Water?” remix. The SOPHIE co-production “ Voices” is a Gregorian-chant-led melodrama, reminiscent in part of Fatima Al Qadiri’s experiments with religious music, with a yearning Kučka hook that’s shredded and slapped with latex. Just four songs feature guest vocalists, and one of those is a remix. Happily, Hi This Is Flume snuffs out that habit, adopting a more sparing and even-handed approach to collaboration. In her review of Flume’s Skin, Stacey Anderson noted a “mathematical quality” in the way Streten treated the vocals of his guest singers, most of them women. Hi This Is Flume’s fragment-like moments might take on more dynamic and emotive tension if Streten allowed himself more complex arrangements, or track lengths with more room to maneuver.

“ Wormhole,” for all its Call of Duty lock-and-load effects, never quite feels sinister, and the siren-like textures of “ Daze 22.00” aren’t as trippy as the title promises. “ Dreamtime,” a vortex of white noise with feathery vocal effects, could soundtrack a Coachella documentary filmed by David Lynch, while the synths of “ Jewel” take on an uncanny vocaloid quality, a little like the melodic manipulations of Battles’ “ Atlas.” At other times, a certain scrappiness would be welcome: less airtight momentum, more negative space. The bulk of the mixtape’s tracks circle the two-minute mark, giving the sense of a sketched roadmap to a new outlook (Streten has already promised “more music to come”). Seventeen cohesive tracks nudge the needle on Streten’s sound, with frequent jump cuts from dismantled clubby beats to pogo-inducing drops and thick bass, while generally keeping his gifts for emotive melodies in the foreground. Hi This Is Flume is, both philosophically and sonically, an inflection point. “Tap the artwork to listen and save to your own music collection,” Streten says with satirical faux-buoyancy. (Streten’s previous full-length was titled Skin, geddit?) Underscoring this message is Hi This Is Flume’s opening title track, a spoken-word novelty which parodies streaming platform commercials. One song, the bright, chime-strewn “ Ecdysis,” is even named after the process of a snake shedding its epidermis. The mixtape’s title has a pointed sense of re-introduction, like the pop superstar who indicates, with a self-titled album years into an established career, that she is pushing the reset button. Hi This Is Flume is set up to self-consciously dismantle the view of Streten as making music optimized for the algorithm. His mega-popular pillowy bangers are engineered for broad appeal, often possessing the “soft, emo-y, cutesy” simplicity that one streaming-first producer, speaking anonymously to Liz Pelly in The Baffler, recognized as playlisting catnip. Despite his work with inventive artists like Vince Staples and Lorde ( and a Grammy to his name), Harley Streten’s music as Flume has often felt like bait for audiences who have moved on from the soft-focus EDM of the influential YouTube channel Majestic Casual but still prefer to keep their listening lite.

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