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Actress Returns With Radical Frame, His First Album Since Hazyville

Eighteen years on, the architect of arcane electronic music picks the blueprint back up.

Somewhere on the tracklist for Radical Frame, between a song called "Withending" and one called "Overchord," sits a track titled "Gimme Tha' Fuckin' Money Man." That whiplash — austere abstraction next to a title that sounds ripped from a group chat — tells you more about what to expect from Actress's new album than any press description could. Darren Cunningham has spent two decades building a catalogue that resists easy description, and Radical Frame arrives refusing to simplify itself even at the level of song titles.

The album lands on Ninja Tune on 18 September 2026, which makes it Cunningham's first full album since his 2008 debut, Hazyville — eighteen years, give or take, between the record that introduced him and the one that's arriving now with a back catalogue of more than ten LPs behind it. That gap is worth sitting with. Cunningham hasn't been quiet in the interim; he's been prolific, by his own label's account developing what amounts to a private vocabulary of hermetic references and inter-dimensional composition across those releases. Radical Frame isn't a comeback so much as a return to the specific starting point, viewed from two decades further into whatever system he's been building.

## Overchord Is the Hinge, Not the Single

Eight tracks make up the record: "The Experiment," "Gimme Tha' Fuckin' Money Man," "Live By You" (featuring CASISDEAD), "Overchord," "Cosmo," "Withending," "Paris," and "Sheets" (featuring Rainy Miller). The label frames "Overchord" as the album's centre, deliberately paired with its precursor "Live By You" — a track that already had a life of its own as a June 2026 single with CASISDEAD attached. That's an unusual way to structure a rollout: lead with the setup track months early, then land the payoff deep in the album's second half. It suggests Cunningham is thinking about Radical Frame as a piece with an actual arc, not a collection of stray singles.

"Overchord" also comes with a video by Anna van der Velde, described by the label as showing Cunningham trapped in a luxury prison of his own making — a strong enough image that it's worth knowing before the song even plays. Van der Velde shares creative direction on the whole album with a collaborator credited as rybskie, so whatever visual language accompanies "Overchord" isn't a one-off; it's presumably the same hand shaping how the rest of the record presents itself.

The featured artists split the difference between insider and outsider. CASISDEAD needs no introduction to anyone who's followed UK rap's more elusive corners. Rainy Miller, credited on closing-adjacent track "Sheets," gets a more specific framing from the label: an artist from Preston — "the provinces," as the description puts it, a small but pointed detail that says Cunningham is reaching outside London for this one.

## Why the Vinyl Pressing Actually Matters Here

There's a genuine reason for collectors to pay attention beyond the tracklist. Independent record shops get an exclusive pressing of Radical Frame on clear coloured 12" vinyl, housed in a printed PVC sleeve — a format choice distinct from whatever the standard release looks like. For an artist whose reputation rests partly on scarcity and specificity (a producer who's spent twenty years, by his label's characterization, pioneering a strand of Black British avant-garde music that doesn't lend itself to mass replication), a limited indie-exclusive pressing isn't just merch. It's the physical extension of the same instinct that makes his records hard to pin down: get it through the right shop, in the right format, or don't get that particular object at all.

That's the part worth flagging now, before release day turns it into a scramble. Indie exclusives on niche electronic records tend to move fast precisely because the audience for them is small, informed, and willing to pre-order. Nobody's going to stumble into this pressing at a big-box retailer.

What Radical Frame actually sounds like remains, appropriately, undisclosed. What's confirmed is a structure — eight tracks, two guest features, a centrepiece deliberately built around a song that already existed as a standalone single, and a visual world handed to the same two collaborators throughout. For an artist who's made a career out of hermetic systems, that's a lot of scaffolding to reveal before a single note is public. The question isn't whether Cunningham has changed in eighteen years. It's how much of his private language he's decided to make legible this time.

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