DJ Seinfeld: If This Is It album review – A confident return
Five years after his last album, Armand Jakobsson returns with a polished collection of dance tracks
Swedish producer DJ Seinfeld is back with his first LP in five years, following the 2021 release of critically acclaimed second album, Mirrors. In the years since, Seinfeld (real name Armand Jakobsson) has established himself as a regular at iconic Ibiza nightclub DC10 and played coveted festival slots everywhere from Coachella to Glastonbury. On album number three, we hear the same electronic melancholy present in earlier work, delivered with the confidence of a DJ who is increasingly used to playing big sets on huge stages.
Jakobsson released music prolifically in the early stages of his career, routinely finding time in a busy gigging diary to churn out multiple EPs per year. His more recent composition process has been significantly more staggered, however, with the DJ first laying down the foundations of this project in the days following album two’s release. If This Is It opens on a gentle note through ‘U Can’t Come Home’, on which the softly spoken TS Graye hums the track’s title over a series of glistening synths. The tempo proceeds to pick up on the dancefloor-ready ‘Quakin’’, before in-demand Aussie duo Confidence Man turn the dial up to 11 on ‘The Right’, a track that will surely ring out from industrial-sized speakers at every DJ Seinfeld gig this summer.
Like his previous work, this record sees Jakobsson ricocheting between moods and sounds, with every moment of exuberance propped up by an undercurrent of despondency. Now older, wiser and blessed with a larger budget, he has firmly established himself as one of the premier producers in contemporary dance, capable of producing multi-faceted tracks that appeal to an extensive range of electronic music fans. Given the five-year wait between projects, Jakobsson might have been expected to take this album in a more adventurous direction, though the new material will undoubtedly keep crowds swaying at glamorous gigs he’s set to play this summer in Ibiza, Paris and Miami.
If This Is It is released by Ninja Tune on Friday 5 June.