There are artists who age by polishing their legacy, and then there is Cindytalk, who seems to age by dissolving it and reassembling the fragments into stranger geometries. "Sunset and Forever" feels less like a late-career statement and more like another controlled implosion - beautiful, slow, and deliberate.

Fronted since the early 1980s by Scottish musician Cinder, Cindytalk has never treated genre as a home. The early records, "Camouflage Heart" and "In This World", dragged post-punk through a storm drain of industrial abrasion and devotional intensity. Cinder’s voice - already etched into 4AD mythology through early collaborations with This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins - floated above wreckage like a fragile annunciation. But even then, there was restlessness: the studio was not a place to document songs, but to erode them.

By the 2000s, that erosion turned granular. Laptop-based abstraction, digital fracture, releases for Editions Mego: the rock chassis was dismantled piece by piece, replaced by electroacoustic atmospheres and glitch-scarred textures. "Sunset and Forever", released by The Helen Scarsdale Agency, doesn’t abandon that evolution. It accepts it as sediment. Cinder’s own reflection that this work grows organically from the past feels accurate. The DNA is intact, but the organism has mutated again.

The album opens with "embers of last leaves", a near-twenty-minute invocation that moves like smoke refusing to disperse. Cyclical tones rise and fold into one another, forming something choral but not quite human. Cinder’s voice is present, though less as a protagonist and more as a spectral current threading through the electronics. It is devotional music stripped of any clear doctrine.

"eien no yyake" and "tower of the sun" introduce disturbances. Low-frequency thuds appear, but they refuse to behave like rhythm. They are interruptions, tectonic shifts beneath the surface. On "tower of the sun", these impacts feel almost architectural - columns of sound erected only to be destabilized by waves of distortion. There’s menace here, but it’s painterly, not theatrical.

"for those eyes, shadows of flowers" blooms in slow radiance. The piece suggests a kind of damaged luminosity, as if the light source were filtered through cracked glass. Comparisons to Fennesz or Holly Herndon might hover at the periphery for some listeners, perhaps even echoes of Lovesliescrushing’s engulfing density, but Cindytalk resists assimilation. The emotional temperature is different: less nostalgic, more liturgical.

The shorter interludes - "my sister the wind" and "invisible adventure" - act like apertures, brief clearings where the texture thins without becoming transparent. They prevent the double LP from collapsing under its own gravity. The pacing is deliberate, but never indulgent.
The closing "i see her in everything" mirrors the opener in scale and spiritual weight. Electronic tones accumulate into something resembling a cathedral choir, yet no single voice dominates. It is reverent without being sentimental, vast without posturing. If this is transcendence, it is one achieved through circuitry and corrosion rather than ascension.

Production-wise, the album is meticulous. Mastered by James Plotkin, it balances density with breathing room, allowing the low-end pressure and high-end shimmer to coexist without smothering each other. Chris Bigg’s cover design, a quiet nod to 4AD’s visual lineage, frames the work without trapping it in nostalgia.

Nothing sounds really resolved in "Sunset and Forever". The sacred and profane, beauty and abrasion, human and machine: none of these binaries win. They simply coexist, sometimes uneasily. Cinder’s career has been defined by this ongoing negotiation, by a willingness to let forms decay so that something less predictable can surface.

After more than four decades, Cindytalk still sounds like a project in motion. Not chasing relevance, not retreating into heritage, but continuing to test how much a sound can erode before it becomes light. "Sunset and Forever" does not offer comfort. It offers immersion. And if you stay with it long enough, you begin to suspect that disintegration, in the right hands, can be a kind of grace.