Jock Nowell-Usticke once aspired to make sunny electronic music meant for summer festivals and poolside hangs, intimate dance songs that glittered with bright-eyed wonder and smiling charm. As an engineering student in New Zealand, he played saxophone and keys in a band but became increasingly drawn to big-tent dance acts like Skrillex and Flume, whose production wizardry Jock thought transcended his classically trained skillset. Shortly after downloading Ableton, however, he released a few downtempo electronic songs under the alias BAYNK and soon garnered a large, devoted fanbase, as well as a reputation as one of the most promising young talents in electronic music. Now, ten years into his career, BAYNK has netted hundreds of millions of streams, sold-out international tour dates, festival-headlining sets, and a Grammy nomination, establishing himself as a quietly visionary artist who continues to expand his sound and aesthetic palate with each new project.

BAYNK takes another massive leap forward on his terrific sophomore album, SENESCENCE, a record he sees as a spiritual successor to his full-length 2021 debut, ADOLESCENCE. While the latter reveled in the heartbreak and immediacy of youth, the former looks to the future, grappling with themes of loss, love, death, and connection. “SENESCENCE is the other side of the coin, about time and the passing of it and the realisations that physical life is not forever—the acute awareness of one’s own biological vulnerability, and with that, a greater appreciation for the true richness of life.” Such an ambitious and amorphous concept could lend itself to platitudes, BAYNK acknowledges, but his scrupulous songwriting and deeply idiosyncratic production resists clichés. “I’m constantly avoiding trying to sound cliché,” he says. “But the majority of the time a cliché is just how it really is.”

Across 10 songs, SENESCENCE announces itself as a daring, dynamic fusion of pop, deep house, contemporary club, funk, and ambient; it instantly stands out as BAYNK’s most fully realised and sonically sophisticated work to date. “It took a long time for my output to catch up with my taste,” he said. “For a long time I felt like I was listening to as much music as I could and learning about how it was made and its history.” If ADOLESCENCE caught BAYNK attempting “to create the perfect festival lineup” from his youth, SENESCENCE finds him exploring the uncharted parameters of his adult artistry, pulling inspiration from the likes of Caribou and Toro y Moi to capture gnarled moments of anxiety, openhearted longing, and searing vulnerability with expressive textures, tempos, and melodies.

After touring ADOLESCENCE around the world—a thrilling yet tumultuous experience, he admits—BAYNK retreated to London in 2022 to begin working on another project. As the conceptual framework and track list for SENESCENCE began to materialise, his ears spontaneously started ringing for days and weeks at a time without end. He was eventually diagnosed with tinnitus, a condition he continues to struggle with. “It just came on one day and hasn’t stopped,” he says. “At the time I thought, ‘It’s over. I won’t be able to listen to mixes the same because I’ll constantly hear this mosquito in my ear clashing with the frequencies.’” Learning to live with tinnitus has been strange and painful, but BAYNK says that his brain has slowly acclimated to the unsettling sensation.

One of the key evolutions for BAYNK on SENESCENCE is his improved songwriting. “This album’s a lot more focused on lyricism and stories as opposed to just being dance tracks,” he says. “The songs still have the DNA of dance music, but the album is mostly concerned with love, friendship, and death—I wanted to reflect that in the writing.” While BAYNK has always been able to distil strong images and intense emotions in his music, his past lyrics often scanned as cue points that listeners could project themselves onto. On SENESCENCE, he challenged himself to evoke the album’s core themes with greater narrative precision: “I haven’t been a strong songwriter in the past or even cared about it that much. It’s always just been melody and beat for me.” he says. “I’m now really precious about the words in my songs. It has to mean something.”

The skittery, restless early album highlight “Fool For You” epitomises BAYNK’s ability to thread evocative writing into electrifying production. “I don’t trust you anymore, you don’t love me like before,” he sings in a double-timed warble over a disjointed drum loop. “I used to be the sort of person who would obsess over people I was in relationships with. I would become a chameleon to their needs and change myself,” he recalls. “‘Fool For You’s’ about the contortion of oneself emotionally to make a relationship work, even when it might not.” Whether it’s the naturalistic imagery deployed to mourn his late grandmother on “What Am I Going to Do With You” or the celebration of romantic commitment on “Lonely World,” BAYNK’s moving descriptions meld brilliantly with his detail-rich, assured production.

Although longtime friends and collaborators The Nicholas, Joe Mason, and Golden Vessel offer their hand to some of SENESCENCE’s instrumentation and production, BAYNK is the only vocalist on the album. “As much as I love collaboration, the most enticing thing for me has always been that I can control everything,” he says. “I can have my hand in the visual, writing, singing, and producing. I love collaboration, but you do lose a little creative freedom when someone else sings your songs.” Making this album between London, Paris, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Hawkes Bay, BAYNK flitted between flats and studios, making beats and writing songs with the help of a Crumar Seven 73-Key Electric Piano, which he played on a bulk of the album and made him “fall back in love with playing keys.”

SENESCENCE is more stylistically varied than BAYNK’s previous projects. There’s hardly a wasted motion, never a stray move. Beyond the stirring emotional tracks there are plenty of punchy strobe-lit anthems that’ll satiate long-time fans. “Mr. Jocko” and “When I Think About Us” are primed to set dancefloors on fire, especially during his upcoming tour. “The album encapsulates the experience I want in a live show and the stories that I want to tell about my life, both now and in the future,” he says. As is consistent with BAYNK’s oeuvre, astonishing visual content will accompany the release of new music, including music video drops for each single. With SENESCENCE, BAYNK once again proves his singular identity and persistent growth as an artist.