Bleep

“Where next?” is a question that longtime followers of the legendary but historically elusive Sandwell District will be familiar with. In 2024, that question became ever more potent, and now it seems to have finally received its answer. Since reigniting the flame in 2023 with the rerelease of the seminal Feed Forward, the collective have decided to keep it diligently burning, first with a compilation (bearing the titular question) of necessary classics and unheard tracks, and now with their first new music since the label closed its doors in early 2012. End Beginnings follows the tragic passing of Juan Mendez AKA Silent Servant, a pillar of the label, and sees Function and Regis re enter the game alongside Mønic and Rivet with reinvigorated purpose: “Having a good time”.

Settling into their new home at Point Of Departure, Sandwell District present some of their most focussed and evolving music together. Rhythmically rich from the get go, the album slowly teases out layered thumps and lines of melody and elasticated vocals on ‘Dreaming’, surrounded by wisps of night air. Crisp organic sounds sneak into the beat patterns, but don’t leave them without Sandwell’s signature grit and smoky presence, as with the bubbling Rrose assisted ‘Self-Initiate’ where low sirens intone and usher in urgent percussion, raised to blaring intensity.

The twists and slams of each track aren’t just dark and heavy for the sake of it; through the cavernous atmospheres emerge a desire to really get the motor running, to jump around with “a sense of unbridled fun”. ‘Will You Be Safe?’ does just that as it applies minimal arrangements and maximum force, updating Sandwell’s sound with hard drum elements and an eerie cinematic string done underneath, furthered in the Sarah Wreath featuring ‘Least Travelled’ as twangy guitar turns the lasering, skittery sonics into an action stealth sequence.

Marked by loss but starting anew, End Beginnings comes full circle, as Sandwell District are firmly back with a gripping and triumphant return.

Sandwell District’s music is perfectly suited to the continuous thump of live settings, where long stretches of time pass by unnoticed in a euphoric daze amidst the smoked out halls of underground clubs. Following the release of Sandwell’s long awaited second album End Beginnings, Regis and Function commanded the early hours at INTONAL 10 festival in Malmö earlier in 2025. Electrifying the crowd with tracks and edits using the original stems from the album and across the collective’s history, this set has been dedicated to wax in collaboration with Rivet, who contributed to End Beginnings’ propulsive energy.

The percussion runs heavy on this one. Rhythms shift and shuffle in a constant cycle of revolving kicks, emphatic hi hats, chunks of hand drums and shots of lightning, shuddering metal and pulsating bass thuds. Atmosphere trickles in with the occasional sci-fi pads and icy vocal edits, and the hisses and exhalations of Regis’s edit of Silent Servant’s ‘Sampler 1 B1’ track, with pieces of gold glittering in a rhythmic chasm containing resonant thuds and long harmonic sighs. The gurgling acid zaps of ‘Hidden’ give way to momentary pulses splitting through the earthy tremors of Kalon’s ‘Haiku’, while visceral swerves and flashes tear through the dense, stampeding array of drums on ‘Grey Cut Out’, heading towards the hints of fiery Latin club on ‘Will You Be Safe?’ with splattered hand drums and hard drops of syncopated beats.

Both records and gigs have been flying out of the Sandwell District camp with force since they reunited, and this release is proof that you shouldn’t be missing either.

The excitement that comes with a returned and reformed Sandwell District doesn’t just include an album and tour dates, but a generous peek at how their new material took shape too. Alongside End Beginnings, their second album as a collective with their first new music in over a decade, Sandwell District offer a selection of demos from the album, showing the tracks in their intriguing nascent states.

Where End Beginnings captures the dense and heavy pummel of the electronic underground Sandwell helped build, these demos are more lofi and lowkey, mistier and mysterious. Elusive harmonic synths gradually emerge and coalesce throughout the course of these tracks, like the twitchy ‘Self-Initiate’ releasing vapour and voltage, whose album version is even more nervous and frantic. That’s not to say they’re missing some bite in these early forms; while ‘Restless’ shifts into almost sci fi territory with its pensive and sizzling chords, its fuzzy, revolving rhythms truly are restless as they keep up the shuffles and wallops without ever settling.

And as the acidic growls, layers of drums, and tactile, rocky beats collide, these demos give a literal underground feel, stalactites and all. The skeletal rhythm of ‘Incubation’ slowly comes to life, its primal, cavernous electro sound eventually injected with warm texture echoing a golden era of electronica. With dripping beats and murky, gurgling bass, it’s an ethereal soundbath set to a hypnagogic club pulse. ‘Dreaming’ meanwhile paces out currents of ambience into an extended, molten breakdown, evoking a long trancelike ritual or a hypnotic dancefloor experience.

End Beginnings Demos is a tantalising look at the inner workings of one of Sandwell District’s most highly anticipated records yet.