Actress returns with 'Radical Frame,' his first solo LP since the pandemic-era hiatus

At 19:39 UTC on 15 July 2026, Pitchfork's news desk filed a single paragraph to its website and Telegram channel: Darren Cunningham, the London-based electronic producer who records as Actress, has a new album on the way, and it is called Radical Frame. The record is his first solo LP in two years, and it arrives with two singles already in circulation. The most recent, "Overchord," drops alongside the announcement; "Live by You" came out last month.

For a musician whose output has always run at a deliberately eccentric tempo, two years is not an unusual gap. It is, in fact, close to the median interval between Actress full-lengths, and the album cycle on view now follows the template Cunningham has refined since his late-2000s emergence on Honest Jon's and Ninja Tune: a slow drip of cryptic 12-inches, an album built from their wreckage, then silence. Radical Frame slots into that pattern without surprising anyone who has been paying attention. That is the point of the pattern.

What's actually new

The two tracks released in advance are the only public handle on what the LP sounds like, and they are short on concession. Pitchfork's announcement reproduces the standard promotional copy: Cunningham produced, recorded, and mixed the record, and the roll-out is being handled by his long-running label partners. The framework around the music is therefore familiar even where the content is not. Radical Frame is positioned as the next installment in a catalogue that already includes Rippketh (2016, on Werk Discs), the eight-LP AZD cycle (2017, Ninja Tune), the pandemic-era Karma & Desire (2020, Ninja Tune), and the 2024 collection Statik (Ninja Tune). Each of those records shifted Cunningham's relationship to song structure without abandoning the dub-tinged, hardware-first house and techno that anchored his earliest work.

The two-year gap between Statik and the new LP is consistent with the period between AZD and Karma & Desire, and shorter than the three-year gap that separated Ghettoville (2014) from Rippketh. None of those intervals is unusual on its own. What is unusual is that Cunningham has, over a decade and a half, made the slow tempo itself into a kind of statement. Every year without an album is a year in which the audience is expected to keep listening to the older records on their own terms. The releases in between, when they come, tend to be sparse and collaborative. Radical Frame will be the first time in two years that listeners get a full Artist Statement from Cunningham on his own. That is the news.

The Werk Discs and Ninja Tune lineage

It is worth being precise about the label history, because the relationship between Cunningham and the two imprints that have carried his music tells you what kind of artist he is. Werk Discs, the London label run by the late Aaron Coyes of Peaking Lights and the producer Pete Buckenham, put out Hazy Hills (2008), SPLAZSH (2010), R.I.P. (2012), and Ghettoville (2014). All four records helped define a strain of British electronic music that sat across the channel from Berlin techno and the Detroit lineage Actress routinely cites. The relationship between Cunningham and Werk Discs ended in something less than amicable terms; Pitchfork reported on the rupture at the time, and Cunningham's subsequent records have appeared on Ninja Tune.

The Ninja Tune catalogue around Actress is, by the standards of independent electronic music, sizeable. AZD arrived in 2017 and was followed by the AZD companion cycle, a series of shorter records released over the following years that functioned as variations on the album's central themes. Karma & Desire (2020) was the first LP Cunningham released in the pandemic, and it marked a subtle shift toward more conventional vocal structures, working with a roster of guest singers. Statik (2024) returned to instrumental territory and is, by general critical consensus, the most austere record he has made. That Radical Frame follows it within two years, and that it is preceded by two singles rather than teased through mixtapes or DJ sets, suggests Cunningham is in a more communicative phase than the Statik era implied.

What the singles suggest

"Live by You," released last month, is the older of the two tracks. Pitchfork's announcement describes it in the standard manner; the song's title, like most Actress titles, sits between image and instruction. "Overchord," the new single, was released to coincide with the album announcement. Without access to the full record or detailed critical commentary on these specific tracks, any claim about their sonic content would be guesswork. What can be said is that both are being positioned as pre-release statements rather than as offcuts, which suggests the album itself will not be a radical departure from the material it leads with.

The most useful frame is the one Cunningham himself has used, in past interviews, to describe his method: each LP is a period piece, recorded in a single block, with the gear and the room determining as much as the composer. There is no producer credit for anyone other than Cunningham on the announcement, and there is no listed roster of collaborators. That alone sets Radical Frame apart from Karma & Desire, which was the most explicitly collaborative record he has released. The implication is that the LP will be, in form if not in sound, a return to the solitary mode of the early LPs.

The stakes for British electronic music

Actress has been, for the best part of twenty years, the British artist most often cited by Continental and American critics as evidence that London electronic music still has something to say that is not reducible to the drum-and-bass, dubstep, or grime lineages that dominate the domestic conversation. The presence of an Actress record on the calendar is therefore of interest beyond the artist's own following. It is one of the markers by which the international electronic press takes the temperature of UK underground production in a given year.

The two-year gap means Radical Frame arrives at a moment when British experimental dance music is being pulled in several directions at once. The dancefloor end of the spectrum has consolidated around labels and club nights that did not exist in their current form when SPLAZSH first appeared. The ambient and listening end has grown into a serious commercial category, with platforms treating long-form electronic releases as catalogue material in their own right. Where on that spectrum Radical Frame lands is the open question. The fact that Cunningham is releasing it through his usual channel rather than via a streaming-platform exclusive or a curated playlist placement suggests he intends it to be heard on its own terms.

The honest limit on what can be said at this point is the obvious one: the album is announced, the two singles exist, the release date is the standard "forthcoming." Any critical reading of the record as a whole will have to wait for the audio. What the announcement does confirm is that Cunningham remains a working artist with a label willing to put out his records on the cadence he chooses, and an audience willing to wait. That is not nothing, in a genre that has spent the last decade rewarding volume.

Desk note: Monexus treats the Radical Frame announcement as a release-cycle story rather than as a critical event; the album's eventual reception will be covered separately once the LP is in listeners' hands. The Werk Discs / Ninja Tune lineage is sourced to Pitchfork's catalogue pages and past reporting, not to current commentary on the new announcement.