''High Anxiety'' is the debut solo album by British musician

Thom Sonny Green Thomas Stuart Green (born November 5, 1985), known professionally as Thom Sonny Green, is an English drummer and electronic music producer. Green attended Leeds University, where he met the musicians with whom he would found the band Alt-J ...

. It was composed and recorded by Green from 2014 to 2016, while he was touring with

alt-J Alt-J (stylised as alt-J, real name Δ) are an English indie rock band formed in 2007 in Leeds. Their lineup includes Joe Newman (guitar/lead vocals), Thom Sonny Green (drums), Gus Unger-Hamilton (keyboards/vocals), and formerly Gwilym Sainsbur ...

, and was released on 19 August 2016 by Infectious and Sudden Records. The album received mixed reviews by critics.

Background and recording

Green started producing in 2012, using his laptop. He composed and recorded the album over the course of two years while touring with

, in hotel rooms. In the process, he used Ableton Live and a short music gear, including Bass Station II and OP-1 synthesisers, a H2n recorder, and a

Game Boy The is an 8-bit fourth generation handheld game console developed and manufactured by Nintendo. It was first released in Japan on April 21, 1989, in North America later the same year, and in Europe in late 1990. It was designed by the same ...

Music

''High Anxiety'' is an

electronica Electronica is both a broad group of electronic-based music styles intended for listening rather than strictly for dancing and a music scene that started in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the term is mostly used to r ...

ambient Ambient or Ambiance or Ambience may refer to: Music and sound * Ambience (sound recording), also known as atmospheres or backgrounds * Ambient music, a genre of music that puts an emphasis on tone and atmosphere * ''Ambient'' (album), by Moby * ...

and experimental album. Green cited Clams Casino, Arca, Deftones and

Radiohead Radiohead are an English rock band formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards); brothers Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar, keyboards, other instruments) and Colin Greenwood (bass) ...

as influences on the record. The title of the album refers to Green's " general anxiety".

Critical reception

''High Anxiety'' received mixed reviews by music critics, many of whom found the album overlong. At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, it received an average score of 57, based on 7 reviews.

Track listing

References

{{Authority control 2016 debut albums Thom Sonny Green albums Infectious Music albums