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Who would pay hard cash for the 16th album by an increasingly irrelevant 51-year-old musician who refuses to tour? Nobody. Not my harsh judgement but the words of Moby himself, which helps explain why pop’s most famous hardcore vegan launched this latest exercise in angst-fuelled electro-rock as a free download.

Building on the knowingly retro post-punk sonics of last year’s These Systems Are Failing, these nine doom-heavy songs marry angular guitars with urgent machine beats and light-touch electronics. The vocals also have an authentically ragged, semi-sneering, new wave edge.

But for all his apocalyptic bleakness, Moby’s electropopulist instincts remain active, lending a euphoric rush even to suicidally glum Joy Division-style confessionals like Silence and All The Hurts We Made.

Moby claims he makes albums purely for pleasure nowadays, and to vent his political despair. Perfectly valid reasons, even if the end result sometimes feels like watching an old man sobbing while having an angry wank. Which, frankly, I can get at home.

Stephen Dalton has been writing about all things rock for more than 30 years, starting in the late Eighties at the New Musical Express (RIP) when it was still an annoyingly pompous analogue weekly paper printed on dead trees and sold in actual physical shops. For the last decade or so he has been a regular contributor to Classic Rock magazine. He has also written about music and film for Uncut, Vox, Prog, The Quietus, Electronic Sound, Rolling Stone, The Times, The London Evening Standard, Wallpaper, The Film Verdict, Sight and Sound, The Hollywood Reporter and others, including some even more disreputable publications.