In an age where playlists often feel like they’ve been auto-generated by sleep-deprived algorithms, Uncanny Valet’s latest offering, Almost Island, is a brilliant act of rebellion. Released on March 14, 2025, the 12-track album isn’t just an exploration of electronic music—it’s a full-scale excavation, unearthing sonic fossils from different eras, brushing off the dust, and recomposing them into something beautifully fractured, impossibly fluid, and totally alive.
The mind behind the music is David Queen, a New York-based writer, publisher, and genre-agnostic sonic architect. You might know Queen for his fiction, his work in VICE or Paste, or his Truman Capote Foundation Fellowship. But through Uncanny Valet, he’s proving that his storytelling prowess doesn’t stop at the page. It pulses through MIDI cables and glitches through reverb tails. It vibrates in the ambient silence between phrases. With Almost Island, Queen pushes the boundaries of what we expect from experimental electronic music—and does so with such finesse that you might miss how weird it all is… at first.
From the start, Almost Island telegraphs its commitment to subversion. The opener “Agin” feels like waking up in a memory someone else had: warm, disoriented, flickering between tones and textures. By the time “Cameo Glass” hits, with its warped funk and tumbling percussion, you know you’ve crossed a threshold into a place where the laws of musical physics are different. Think if Mtume got stuck in a VHS machine operated by Aphex Twin, and you’re almost there.
What makes Almost Island such a triumph is its willingness to be genuinely unpredictable. Not in the “randomizer” way so many modern experimental albums fall back on, but in a deeply considered, poetic sense. Queen bends genres and expectations like glass in a flame. Tracks like “Ripripple” and “Nonlin” slide between dub-like pulse, ambient haze, and jazzy trip-hop with no regard for genre boundaries, and thank god for that. There’s joy in the splicing, a kind of mischievous curiosity that runs through the record like a hidden melody.
Ambient textures are abundant, especially in songs like “Mirror Index” and “Isotope.” But don’t mistake this for background music. Queen’s ambient work is always alert, always asking something of the listener—an invitation to listen closer, not tune out. “Pitch City,” for example, drapes its lurching rhythm in a cloak of delicate synth shimmer that somehow feels like both a slow dance and an SOS signal. The track’s sense of controlled chaos is signature Uncanny Valet: always shifting, never jarring.
Lyrically, the album is mostly wordless, but that doesn’t mean it’s mute. Queen is a writer, after all, and the titles alone feel like cryptic poems: “Oft,” “Tati,” “Sans.” They hint at absence, recursion, memory. They suggest narratives without revealing them, letting you fill in the emotional blanks with your own projections. It’s music that interacts with your imagination, instead of spoon-feeding you a mood.
And then there’s the crown jewel: the title track, “Almost Island.” Clocking in at over eight minutes, it’s a sprawling, slow-burning ambient epic that feels like the aural equivalent of drifting out to sea on a raft of half-forgotten dreams. It’s not just the best track on the album—it’s one of the best ambient pieces released this year. It’s cinematic, intimate, and vast. A journey. A diary entry from somewhere between consciousness and oblivion.
If Almost Island proves anything, it’s that David Queen is not afraid to get weird, nor is he afraid to get beautifully clear when the moment calls for it. This is not an album that chases trends or bends to the streaming era’s skip-happy impulses. Instead, Uncanny Valet invites you to lose yourself in an emotional topography that’s uncharted, layered, and strange in all the right ways.
To step onto Almost Island is to let go of the map. It’s not a place you can locate. But once you’ve been, you’ll know exactly where it is.
