Andrew Hung and Ben Power are Fuck Buttons, and it’s important to think of them in the way you think about Boards of Canada and Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers: duos that come across as electronic but know how to play instruments. You don’t get a bag of thunder like “Brainfreeze” without being a drummer and you don’t get an album like Slow Focus without knowing how to play a live set. This is instrumental music that accretes slowly into little ziggurats of dread. It’s a golden bummer! The Buttons have a few moves nobody else has. One is a sound, sort of a robot yawn, a vocal kind of filter that makes it sound as if the machines are reaching through their dimension into ours. Maybe the purest version is “Stalker,” which is like a panic attack turned into data and set through a fuzzed out Arp Odyssey and back into an EZ-Pass scanner. It just gets worse and worse and more beautiful once you realize you’re through the gate and free—free to go.

– Sasha Frere-Jones