Moby was an established artist working his way through a career crisis when he released Play in 1999. Combining gospel- and blues-based field recordings with contemporary sounds, Play was a critical success and a commercial hit, in no small part due to licensing deals that boosted the profiles of every song on the album.
Moby followed up Play with a few similar albums – the follow-up, 18, surprisingly charted higher than Play on Billboard’s album chart – before his muse began carrying him in different directions. Over the last 20 years, Moby has released records filled with long ambient compositions, suitable for meditation and rest – the appropriately-named Long Ambients recordings – and returned to his punk rock roots with These Systems Are Failing and More Fast Songs About the Apocalypse, both reminiscent of his controversial 1996 punk-inspired Animal Rights.
Most recently, Moby has recorded strikingly new interpretations of his earlier songs on Reprise (2021) and Resound New York (2023). But now, having worked through such a wide variety of recording projects, Moby has returned to a collection of new pop-based songs with Always Centered at Night. The LP might inspire comparisons to Play – each is a well-considered collection of focused pop songs that touch on a variety of genres – but the new album is no mere re-Play, and not merely because it is not focused on songs featuring vocal samples of field recordings. Always Centered at Night is, though, a song centered around singers.
Always Centered at Night grew from a series of eight singles, each a collaboration with a different vocalist, released between June 2022 and March 2024. While the first of these (“Medusa” featuring Aynzli Jones) is a lively tune, ready for the dance floor, many of these songs have the melancholy feel of the second single, “On Air”, a collaboration with serpentwithfeet (Josiah White). Always Centered at Night opens with “On Air”, and much of the album’s mood can be summed up by its lyric, “It’s been a minute since I’ve seen you smile.”
Other examples of this introspective nature include “Transit” (with Gaidaa) and the closer, “Ache For”, a wintry jazz ballad sung beautifully by Jose James. These and other nocturnal meditations comprise the heart and soul of Always Centered at Night.
The melancholy that permeates Always Centered at Night is not an entirely downcast thought. For example, “Wild Flame”, featuring Danae, brings some heat. So does “Dark Days”, a percolating tune with a soulful vocal by Lady Blackbird, and an organ solo by Moby that might be my favorite instrumental moment on the record. Other upbeat tracks like “Should Sleep” (with J.P. Bimeni), “Feelings Come Undone” (Raquel Rodriguez), and “Fall Back” (with Akemi Fox) counterbalance the quieter tunes here.
Perhaps the most striking of songs not released as a pre-album single is “Where Is Your Pride?” featuring Benjamin Zephaniah, a British writer, actor, musician, and professor who died in December 2023. Zephaniah, who, like Moby, was an outspoken vegan and animal rights activist, poses a series of questions (“Where is your love? / Where is your faith? / Where is your hope?”), culminating in a repeated evocation of the title question, all over an upbeat ambient track that is the most extroverted musical moment on the often-introverted Always Centered at Night.
Ultimately, Moby is not breaking any new ground on Always Centered at Night. We have all heard Sad Moby and Dance Floor Activist Moby before. Despite this familiarity, Moby and his talented collaborators have created something comfortable, moody, evocative, and, yes, perfectly centered for nighttime listening.