Fire-Toolz Walk With Me: Angel Marcloid’s Warp Debut Lavender Networks Arrives

Angel Marcloid’s Fire-Toolz has its first release on Warp Records. Lavender Networks places Marcloid alongside Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada and marks a clear expansion in scale and visibility for her maximalist project.

The record raises an easy question: has Fire-Toolz sold out? The answer, quickly: no. Lavender Networks broadens Marcloid’s palette without flattening her chaos. The album still stitches together screensaver EDM, Hypercolor death metal, blackened new age and other hybrids that normally resist mixing. What’s changed is a more elastic sense of arrangement and an openness to unexpected collaborators.

That openness shows up most obviously on “And Where Is the Heart? I’ve Searched My Entire Home.” The guest vocalist is Nashville’s Jennifer Holm, a mother of two whom Marcloid found via incidental music on a YouTube video. Holm’s coffeehouse, soulful voice lands in an unlikely slot on a Fire-Toolz record and fits the groove with surprising ease.

The track that follows, “The Ocean Gratitude Cylinder Peace Necklace Lemonade Flying Free,” leans into an R&B inflection before detonating into a power-drill, speed-metal thrasher. Josh Plotner supplies subterranean sax across its two rapid minutes. Earlier, “A Demon & Its Spinal Cord Flapping in the Wind” reads as Autechre fronted by Ministry’s Al Jourgensen — an abrasive, clever collision that nonetheless feels intentional.

Opening the album, “Quintessential Fixed Width Unfoldment” runs nearly eight minutes. It begins with tranquil Tangerine Dream-like synths, moves into corroded vocals and chugging guitars, and carries a harplike, Vangelis-adjacent melody. Zola Jesus contributes cybernetic singing at points. A flute appears. Individually these elements should resist each other. Together they attain a brittle unity.

Marcloid’s approach remains extreme and maximalist. Tracks swap tempos and textures with abruptness. Blast beats and guttural shrieks sit beside Tupperware synths and chiming arpeggios. At moments the music uses the sonic language of misery and darkness. But the record often turns that language toward light: glistening synths, rubbery rhythms and vivid timbres push toward brightness rather than purely hostile noise.

Small moments underline the record’s looseness. One overdriven track with a title that includes emoticons and numbers closes with a cat purring. It is a quiet, domestic hum after a record full of collisions. Lavender Networks enlarges Fire-Toolz’s sound without erasing what made it singular.