Gi Gi – In Lieu
The more I listen to modern electronica and the spread of producers across bedrooms and laptops, the more I appreciate the digitized music that first rose into the mainstream in the 1990s—despite being immediately fractured into sub- and micro-genres—and the more I’m convinced of its staying power. So my fandom over In Lieu, the new album from Australia-by-way-of-Texas musician Gi Gi, feels like something of a victory lap.
Gi Gi built his reputation as a sample-based artist across five prior LPs and two album-length mixtapes—some bits and pieces recognizable in the rhythmic and melodic lines, others manipulated into textural anonymity. His catalog touches drum and bass and electroacoustics and many points in between, but In Lieu is as populist an entry in it. It relies on a loving overlap of styles that lean into mellow psychedelia.
Lead single “Pink Dirt” has hand and kit drum arrangements recalling late-1980s new wave and the echoing production of dub, and “Some Of” immediately follows that up with the kind of structured jazz horns that Meat Beat Manifesto brought into the next decade. Indeed, that crew’s brand of industrialized pulse seems to underpin a good deal of the music on In Lieu, including the hypnotic staccato of “Separate Lateral.”
Gi Gi here rests in the shade of bass music roots planted during those years. Thick, chugging percussion lines from intelligent techno also show up in “Acumen,” and there are suggestions of breaks music in tracks like “Harmless.” Trip-hop and acid jazz also have a strong presence on In Lieu. “Optio” opens the LP with stutter-stepping beats and snippets of vocodered conversations, while “Going 2” embraces an insistent Latin rhythm.
This is an album that embraces electronica’s graying audience, and also reminds the field’s younger fans that not every great dramatic moment or headnodding hook requires volumemaxxing or jagged distortion. In Lieu may come off as a throwback, but Gi Gi makes it a time warp you’ll want to commit to repeatedly. In the process, he quietly hardens his status as a DJ Swiss Army knife.
Label: Mood Hut
Year: 2026
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