Fire-Toolz Walk With Me: Angel Marcloid’s Warp Debut Lavender Networks Expands a Maximalist Universe

Lavender Networks marks Angel Marcloid’s first release for Warp Records, a career-defining move that places Fire-Toolz alongside names like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada while still refusing to simplify its aesthetic.

If there’s a provocation at the center of Lavender Networks it isn’t commercial pivoting but scale. Marcloid has taken the same outré palette that made earlier Fire-Toolz records feel like a fever dream—screensaver EDM, Hypercolor death metal, blackened new age—and polished it without neutering the chaos. Blast beats and guttural shrieks now sit in a more supple arrangement amid Tupperware synths and call-waiting arpeggios; the result reads as a more confident, more deliberately arranged riot.

That confidence is clearest in the record’s oddest accommodation: a country-singer cameo. The guest is Nashville’s Jennifer Holm—described on her website as a mother of two who smiles in a crinkly way—whom Marcloid found through incidental music on a YouTube clip. Holm’s warm, coffeehouse delivery on “And Where Is the Heart? I’ve Searched My Entire Home” isn’t a novelty stunt. It fits, weirdly and wonderfully, like a glove on a racket. The placement reframes the record’s eclecticism as curiosity rather than pastiche.

Marcloid also makes space for other unexpected textures: Josh Plotner contributes subterranean sax to the R&B-leaning “The Ocean Gratitude Cylinder Peace Necklace Lemonade Flying Free,” a two-minute speed-metal drill that somehow breathes between its whiplash transitions. Earlier, “A Demon & Its Spinal Cord Flapping in the Wind” sounds like Autechre fronted by Ministry’s Al Jourgensen—an apt shorthand, but only a gateway into a song that refuses tidy comparison.

The opening “Quintessential Fixed Width Unfoldment,” at nearly eight minutes the album’s longest track, announces Lavender Networks’ modus operandi. It starts with tranquil Tangerine Dream-esque synth chords, detonates into corroded vocals and chugging guitars, and then settles into harplike, Vangelis-adjacent melodies that coexist with cybernetic vocals from Zola Jesus and, at one point, a flute. These parts should repel one another, and yet Marcloid manages to conjoin them into an uncanny unity—an intentional pileup rather than a collage on the verge of collapse.

What steadies the album amid its sonic carnage is Marcloid’s emotional clarity. The textures can be as lacerated and punishing as any outlet for adolescent despair, but the affect is not nihilistic. Glistening synths and rubbery rhythms transmute fury into something closer to rapture: a kind of radioactive joy that reframes stormy noise as expression rather than catharsis. One excessively overdriven track—its title a string of emoticons and numbers—ends with a domestic, almost tender sound: a cat purring. It’s a small but telling choice that signals intent.

So has Fire-Toolz sold out by signing to Warp? Not in any obvious way. Marcloid’s music has simply grown larger and brighter, and the label shift amplifies rather than dilutes the project’s appetite. Lavender Networks is still maximalist and extreme: a mangled freeway pileup of tempos, tones, and aesthetics. But where past albums sometimes felt like controlled demolition, this record feels like a choreographed collision—messy by design, and clear in its aims.

In that sense, Lavender Networks is less about compromise than about refinements worth noting. Marcloid didn’t trade in eccentricity for accessibility; she reframed it. The payoff is an album that can be confronted as an assault or embraced as an elaborate, multicolored offering. Either way, Fire-Toolz hasn’t lost its appetite for risk—only its hesitation about what those risks can look like when they’re allowed to expand.