Momus - Acktor

Release date: 11/24/2025
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1. What's Your Take?
2. Car Crash Man
3. The Blond Beast
4. Hothead
5. Randomness
6. Odradek
7. Eat The Disease
8. Mr Young Men
9. The Kitchen
10. Busted
11. Beautiful When Angry
12. Situationship
13. Quantum Strangeness
14. Anyone's Guess

After making a couple of albums using AI — one in k-pop style, one bossa nova — Momus reverts to full human composition with Acktor, his second album of 2025. AI is rapidly losing its glitchy edge and becoming too slick and dull, the veteran Scottish "electronic folk singer" explains. The record's title was originally going to be Activism, to make a sort of dialogue with the themes on Quietism, the last Momus album. That then became Acktivism with a K, since "ack!" is an expression of frustration. Acktivism got shortened to Acktor: we're all actors on the world's stage, artfully contriving to convince, faking our sincerity. The first Acktor song pulls no punches, asking: "What's your take on Hitler now Americans want to share his big ideal with everyone?" Car Crash Man, on the other hand, presents a narrator without the courage of his own convictions, torn by self-contradiction. The operatic 1980s techno-pop of Haruomi Hosono lends this track its edge. Hosono's 1985 album with Miharu Koshi, Boy Soprano, is also referenced in the typography of the Acktor sleeve, and his musical influence pops up in Mr Young Men, a track named after a Japanese okonomiyaki chain. The Blond Beast is a song about the ambivalence of success, and Randomness takes its cue from the title of a journal by John Cage: "How to improve the world (you will only make matters worse)". Searching for "the good America" he remembers from his youth, Momus celebrates the downtown New York performance art scene of the 1970s in The Kitchen: the song's narrator is a shy gadfly observing the milieu which spawned artists like Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk. Other songs deal with relationship issues, the beauty of anger, and the putative quantum multiverse in which infinite versions of ourselves endlessly remix and remake our acts. That's all on theme, and all text, but musical texture is also central to Acktor: timbre, the colour of sound. This very personal, ambitious yet ambivalent record — his last to be recorded in Berlin — closes with Momus singing: "It's becoming clearer, the arc of my life: not exactly failure, never quite success". Well, why not both?