Fred Again Pours Out Another Batch of Gloriously Sad Bangers With ‘Ten’: Album Review

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Fred Gibson was already a successful pop songwriter when his galvanizing trilogy of “Actual Life” albums began emerging in surprisingly rapid succession as the pandemic lifted.

Released over just 18 months, the albums were a sort of living musical diary, filled with sophisticated dance/house/electronic-leaning sounds but also a sense of emotion and songcraft rare for the genre, which usually tends to be production-based more than song-based.

Built around voice notes from himself and friends, internet posts and samples of other artists’ work, Fred’s musicality, gently pulsating beats and melancholic songwriting — he’s cowritten hits for Ed Sheeran, Rita Ora and others, and was mentored by his childhood neighbor, Brian Eno — made many of these digitally based songs as vividly human as any singer-songwriter’s.

Gibson’s star deservedly rose quickly as those albums sunk in, and he’s been on a sort of collaboration binge ever since, playing roof-raising DJ sets at Madison Square Garden and Coachella with Skrillex and Four Tet, collaborating on entire albums with them, as well as Eno and Romy from the XX, and dropping stray tracks or remixes or features seemingly every month.