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Back in May, as Brighton Festival curator, Brian Eno played his first British live shows since 1974 with an improvisational collective featuring guitarist Leo Abrahams and keyboard player Jon Hopkins. Their performances were playful, occasionally sublime, and surprisingly raucous in places.

The trio are reunited here on Eno’s first solo album in five years, his debut release on the innovative electronic label Warp. For fans of the shiny-domed pop professor’s seminal early solo career, as opposed to his left-field studio work for superstar bands like U2 and Coldplay, these amorphous sound paintings and disembodied film scores will not sound groundbreaking.

But they are lush and layered and full of drama, as Eno and friends blend digital drones with tribal percussion and shuddering waves of fuzz guitar. There are even some headbanging numbers, notably Horse and 2 Forms of Anger, in which electro-jazz noodling gives way to stomping noise-rock.

Are you ready for ambient heavy metal?

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.