"Acid nostalgia" is Lawrence English's term for the version of memory that got repurposed over the past decade, the one that flattens the past into a single clean image and uses it to cancel whatever might have come next. He sets it out in the liner notes to The Rest Is My Ghost, released on his own Room40 label on 7 August. This nostalgia, he writes, "seeks only singular recollection", and has become "a methodology at best, and a weapon at worst, used to erode the past and project forward a collapsed and unimaginably sanitised version" of what came before. The record closes a loose trilogy begun with Wilderness of Mirrors in 2014.

Which means it arrived pre-argued. Uncut traces the concept back to Mark Fisher and Adam Curtis, The Skinny calls the album a sonic essay on memory, and Simon Kirk's Sun 13 review spends its opening on the societal weight of nostalgia before it reaches a note. I came to it the same way, through the writing around it, so this describes a reception as much as a release. A thesis travels faster than a drone, and English has handed everyone a very good thesis.

The track titles are better evidence than the liner notes. "Sodium Vapour Halo", "Metabolic City", "Aerial Cable", "One Line Sky": infrastructure, and the sliver of sky between towers. Sodium is the sharpest of the four, because that light is being switched off. Councils have been swapping the orange for white LED since 2016, the best part of half a billion pounds of it, so the haze is becoming a colour people remember rather than see, warm, uniform, flattering to nothing. Exactly the sanitised single image English says the weapon is built out of. The sleeve makes the same argument in a picture, that collapsing grey canyon, two cities tipping toward each other across a pale jagged seam, printed like a bad photocopy.

On paper the cast is comically stacked: Chris Abrahams and Tony Buck from The Necks, Norman Westberg from Swans, Thor Harris, Chuck Johnson's pedal steel, Mats Gustafsson, The Australian Voices, Madeleine Cocolas. Reviewers hunting for them come back with very little. Backseat Mafia's John Parry gets Westberg's guitar twisting in the swell of "Acid Nostalgia", and not a great deal else. English buries his collaborators the way a city buries its older streets.

The disagreement is at the end. Kirk hears English climbing out of the void onto new land. The Skinny hears "not despair, but certainly not resolution", and Backseat Mafia hears the closing bell of "GhostType" as either decline or restoration and declines to choose. One reading of recovery against two of irresolution is not much of a split until you notice what the album is about. A record arguing against singular recollection has produced criticism that cannot settle on a single memory of it.

Design or luck, and I would guess design, because the same refusal runs through the sequencing. No climaxes, no release, pieces rolling into one another so the thing has to be taken whole. The weapon English names works by making the past small and certain, and he has built fifty minutes that will do neither.

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