About

Origin is a solid album for Jordan Rakei, a professional statement from an artist who seems to be just beginning to show everything he has to offer. Here, Rakei has more confidence than most emerging artists, and is able to implement his lush production into a unified work of paranoid dark realism. Where his previous albums were introspective and personal, Rakei now funnels his frustration outward, taking on themes that are universal to our cultural identity. At its worst, this record feels like a stepping-stone toward a great release, but at its best, Origin is a fun and rich album and a demonstration of Rakei’s significant potential. – Sun Genre

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Soulful, intimate and expansive all at once, Jordan Rakei’s third album, “Origin”, cuts straight to the point, in every sense of the word. The melodies are brighter, the sound is bigger and the vision behind it more finely-tuned. Switching up from the highly personal and intimate portrait he painted with 2017’s “Wallflower”, which was a way of grappling with his experience of anxiety and introversion, “Origin” is overtly inspired by dystopian visions of our future - notably Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. “I’m worried that we’re losing a sense of connection,” explains Jordan, with many of the album lyrics exploring technological growth, and how it affects our sense of humanity. For example, new single ‘Say Something’ is “about speaking up for what you believe in”, a call to arms for future humans to stand up against the AI systems which govern a now-dystopian world. It follows recent single ‘Mind’s Eye’, which envisions a future world where malfunctioning tech implanted in the human body has flooded the users mind with projections of chaos. He meditates daily, something he adopted partly in response to his issues with anxiety, and something which has shaped his worldview and informed his writing and production process. – Bandcamp