And They All Look Broken Hearted

From "Rounds," this track wears its emotional register in its title more explicitly than most Four Tet music — and then delivers something more formally complex than the phrase might suggest. The broken-heartedness here is not maudlin or melodramatic; it's articulated through fragmentation itself, through samples that arrive already damaged, through melodic phrases that reach toward resolution and then dissolve before arriving. Acoustic guitar elements, processed beyond clear identification but still carrying the warm resonance of real strings, weave through electronic textural beds with the specificity of lived memory — the way certain sounds are so associated with certain times that hearing them is a kind of temporal displacement. The rhythm is hesitant and syncopated, more felt than heard, operating below the surface of the more identifiable harmonic content. There's a peculiar beauty in the way Hebden handles sadness in this period of his work — treating it not as a subject to be represented but as a structural principle, building broken things with the intention that they remain broken, that their incompleteness is their meaning rather than a problem to be solved. This is one of the essential tracks for understanding what folktronica achieved at its best.