Max Richter lets the flood in, then finds a choir

While The Flood Rages is at its best when it stops being beautiful. Max Richter's new album takes nineteen tracks from the score he wrote for Wayne McGregor's ballet after Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy. It opens on calm and then walks a city through a grinder. He has made more celebrated records. He has rarely made one this suspicious of its own prettiness.

Richter was born in Hamelin in 1966, grew up in Bedford, studied composition at Edinburgh and the Royal Academy, and then with Luciano Berio in Florence. He spent a decade in the ensemble Piano Circus, playing Arvo Pärt, Brian Eno, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Memoryhouse arrived in 2002, The Blue Notebooks in 2004, Sleep in 2015. Since then the work has split between his own records, more than fifty scores for film and television, an Academy Award nomination this year for Hamnet, and Studio Richter Mahr, the space he founded with his partner Yulia Mahr. In a Landscape came in 2024, Dance Music in 2025. This is the third time McGregor has had him, after Infra (2008) and Woolf Works (2015).

The ballet lives in Atwood's wreckage: a city eaten by industrial technology and commercial hostility, a genetically engineered population living quietly beside what remains of everybody else, the survival of the natural world and ordinary feeling both in doubt. The score runs in three acts and never settles the argument. The album is out now. A listening event is booked at Friendly Pressure in London for October 17.

The palette is one he has been refining for two decades. Piano figures repeat until they mean something, strings swell and pull back, and the electronics come in as weather rather than rhythm. For the first time in a while, a lot of it is allowed to be ugly. 'Wave After Wave' takes the theme from 'Europe, After the Rain' and darkens it, so transformation lands in the opening minutes as a threat instead of a promise. The low end sits under the strings like something moving in the water.

'Their Eerie Music' is the gentlest passage here, a small figure for the benign humanoids, and its calm is deliberate. The next full track, 'The City Was A Chaos', drags industrial noise and glitch under the piano until the melody is barely holding on. It works because Richter never announces the switch. 'Quiet' restores the placid and echoes the piano of 'On the Nature of Daylight', close enough to be a deliberate self-quote. 'Data Ballistics' answers with a bellicose industrial stomp, the sound of the corporation that owns Atwood's world. 'Oh Let Me Not Be Proud' sets a choir against electronics and finds that some harmony survives anyway. Then 'Sweet Air' is 'Quiet' again with the edges moved, which this late reads as reprise rather than shortcut.

The last third is where the title gets paid off. 'Dawn' moves into new light. 'Background Radiation' clicks and ticks like a Geiger counter over a melody that refuses to panic. 'My Body Is My Earthly Ark' is the most plainly spiritual writing on the record, and it is over before it settles. 'Now We Can Sing' runs 11:36, gathers the motifs from 'Quiet' and 'Sweet Air', and lets the electronics give way to an orchestral crescendo. It is an affirmation, and it is earned.

This one is for people who already live in his catalog, and for anyone who found In a Landscape too still. It sits in the company of Glass and Eno, and of Pärt at his quietest, and it will not work as background: the industrial passages come looking for you. The extras are a Richter set of extras. A crossword book he has overseen, with newly commissioned essays from the literary critic Anahid Nersessian and the philosopher Victoria Trumbull, is on limited stock. A digital edition goes to members of his community, and a special item of merchandise is planned. Play it in order, once, in the dark.

The flaw is the connective tissue. Nineteen tracks include four fragments labelled Intro or Outro. The early ones, especially the opening 'Wave After Wave (Intro)' and the 'Their Eerie Music (Outro)', do what a ballet score has to do and a record does not: set a scene and leave. On a straight listen the first half stutters, and the stage machinery is audible. Cut them and the arc tightens. Keep them and the theatre stays in.

Nineteen tracks is a long sit for music built on repetition, and it holds because the calm is never allowed to run unbroken for long. The final stretch is the argument: after all that industrial weather, a choir and a string section agree on something, quietly, and then not quietly. What he has made is a flood album that ends with people singing. A 4.

The tracklist

Hear it