After Groove Is in the Heart

Towa Tei spent much of the 1990s as the DJ holding Deee-Lite together—the producer behind Groove Is in the Heart, one of those records so precisely itself that nothing before or after it sounds quite like it. After Deee-Lite dissolved he kept going quietly, releasing solo albums that never quite broke through but always had something to offer: layered collaborations, immaculate textures, a devotion to language as both lyrical and sonic material. Wordy, his 2012 album, leans all the way into that last interest. The title announces the intent. It’s a record preoccupied with words—how they sound separate from what they mean, how a voice is also an instrument, how meaning and melody keep borrowing from each other. Not a comeback record, not a bid for relevance. Just Towa Tei doing the thing he’s always done, a little more explicitly than usual.