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“Only Fans” is one of two moments on Palaces that portends a more limber, sophisticated future for Flume, in which Streten feels more confident to mold himself to his collaborators as opposed to the other way around. María rarely gets to be so wordy on her own songs, which mostly take the form of raucous techno tracks “Only Fans” gives her the space to weave her idiosyncratic outlook into Flume’s more mainstream world. “Only Fans,” a squelching sci-fi banger featuring the underrated Madrid techno artist Virgen María, is the most impishly fun song here, one that recaptures the lawless feeling of Hi This Is Flume’s Slowthai collaboration “High Beams.” Over a skeletal beat, María raps breathily about sex work and puritanical gatekeepers with invigorating glee (“Fucking censorship, oh my god!/A break to the sex shop/Only Fans, that’s my job!”) while Flume’s laser-like synths fire underneath. On the whole, these kinds of songs-where Streten chooses to leave a featured artist’s presence intact, building tracks around them rather than splicing them into the fabric of the song itself-fare best. Although MAY-A’s lyrics still feel relatively lightweight-“It hurts to love and leave, I don’t love you lеss/I saw it on your sleeves, you made such a mess” goes one particularly word salad-y couplet-she glides over the track unencumbered without Streten chopping and reshaping her vocals, she feels more like a genuine collaborator. “Say Nothing,” featuring the husky-voiced 20-year-old Sydney musician MAY-A, is built around a metallic baile funk beat that adds a rhythmic consistency uncommon to a Flume track. But Palaces is most successful when Streten removes himself from this zone and instead puts his own spin on entirely different styles. These songs, along with hypnotic, sample-heavy instrumentals like “DHLC” and “Love Light,” attempt to recreate the atmosphere of Skin, contrasting intense tension with moments of relief and weightlessness to mimic the build/drop dynamic of an EDM track without sounding quite like EDM. Streten still largely treats his non-rap vocalists like samples, a trick that’s fun on the first go-around and frustrating on the fourth or fifth. It’s a predictable kind of chaos, and, as ever, lyrics feel largely unimportant: Lines like “Help me elevate, I just wanted to escape” and “Where’ve you been, where did you go? How can you sleep knowing you don’t know?” loosely evoke pathos without coalescing into anything genuinely resonant. Three songs-“Highest Building,” featuring French vocalist and producer Oklou “Escape,” with mainstay collaborator Kučka and “I Can’t Tell,” with British musician Laurel-all use the same clash of vaporous vocals and fragmented synths that Streten has been leveraging since the start of his career. With little penchant for bedlam, it’s an album that lacks the exact thing that makes Flume’s music exciting.Īt its worst, Palaces feels downright formulaic.

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Although not without its inspired moments, Streten’s third record most often feels like Skin 1.5-a collection of ideas that might have been novel before Hi This Is Flume, but which now feel stale in comparison to the more interesting fare that’s come since. Palaces, the first Flume “album” in six years, confirms this unreservedly.

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That mixtape, and a handful of one-off collaborations with Toro Y Moi, London Grammar, Vera Blue, and Reo Cragun released around the same time, indicated that, like Charli XCX or Lil Wayne, Streten is most creatively free outside the album format. 2012’s Flume and 2016’s Skin nestled jagged instrumental gems like “Helix” and “Wall Fuck” amid more forgettable, down-the-line producer/vocalist collabs 2019’s Hi This Is Flume mixtape suggested that Streten feels most at home when working with artists like Slowthai, JPEGMAFIA, and SOPHIE, unpredictable pop tricksters able to meet him on his level. Flume albums show off this puckish streak in fits and starts.

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