For those not yet familiar, Macro/micro is the alias of Tommy Simpson, a prolific artist working at the intersection of IDM, experimental electronic and ambient music. His latest release, A.fter I.ntelligence, is the most refined and fully dialed-in version of that palette so far. At its heart, this is a thought-provoking concept record, using AI existential risk as its main frame and nudging you toward thorny questions about agency, consciousness and ethics in a world of increasingly powerful machines. The beauty of it, though, is that it’s anything but a dry, hollow statement. The sound hits first, and it hits hard. With disorienting synth work, glitchy stop-and-start rhythms, a machine-like pulse and abrasive flickers of noise, the album feels like a visceral feast if you’re into darker electronic music. Long story short, A.fter I.ntelligence is a mesmerizing, tightly wound thought experiment in musical form, one that grips the ears while it keeps the mind quietly spinning.
Across the early stretch of the album, Simpson draws out an AI fever dream that feels uncomfortably familiar. The hypnotic opener “Clicks (Prologue)” sets the tone with its lulling tempo, processed voice and subtle glitches that mimic the frictionless loop of scrolling, refreshing and believing whatever the feed serves you.
There’s a recurring trick throughout the record: a tension between “oh, this is catchy” and “okay, this is ominous,” and “Artificial Super Intelligence (Digital Dark Arts)” is one of the clearest examples of it. It moves at a midtempo pace you can nod along to, but the atmosphere and sound palette grow steadily darker. New layers of industrial thumps, darksynth-adjacent stabs, bass swells and almost-whispered spoken-word phrases that feel like warnings slide in, and small rhythmic mutations keep creeping through as the arrangement evolves. It all mirrors the subject matter: systems growing more capable and less interpretable.
As the album moves into its middle stretch, the sound gets heavier, more fragmented and more haunted. “Paperclip Maximizer,” borrowing its name from a classic thought experiment, plays like one in motion. It moves at a relatively slow, subdued tempo but is packed with glitches, fractured noises and stray bursts of distortion, like a system single-mindedly grinding forward regardless of what it breaks along the way. For me, one of the album’s high points is “The Hard Problem: Intelligence Is (Not Necessarily Sufficient for) Consciousness,” where live drums drive everything forward and give the track an almost bodily urgency, while angular synths and strange, disorienting textures keep shifting the ground under your feet. “Fully Autonomous War Machines” feels more stripped-back on the surface, yet it is another strong example of that catchy-versus-ominous tension. Its steady, marching pulse feels like something heavy and weaponized moving closer, step by step.
If there’s one place I’d nitpick, it’s the final third. The last three tracks, “De-Empty,” “Inward Retreat” and “Judgement Day,” pull back from the harsh, hyper-detailed edges into more open, ambient territory, with drifting textures and softer contours. They aren’t weak tracks on their own, but they feel a little out of context, chipping away at some of the tight, high-stakes momentum the record has built up to that point. Maybe that inward turn is intentional, a way for Simpson to move the focus from speculative systems back to the humans who have to live alongside them, but for me it still doesn’t quite click as a fully satisfying finale.
In the end, even on a purely sonic level, A.fter I.ntelligence is a deeply rewarding listen for anyone drawn to off-kilter electronic music with real tension in its bones. But part of what makes it stand out is how it handles its theme. Plenty of artists are tackling AI right now, but too much of it lands as generic dread or empty hot takes. Simpson, though, isn’t treating AI as a cartoon villain or using the concept as an excuse to rant. Instead, the album plays like a sequence of emotional, sonic and psychological scenes, where lurching rhythms, dense textures and pressure-building grooves let you feel the questions from the inside rather than just hear them stated. If you’ve followed Macro/micro for a while, this feels like the point where his ideas and his craft meet at full power. If you haven’t, it’s one hell of a reason to go backwards.
You can buy the whole album starting January 6 on EVEN and Bandcamp. For streaming listeners on Spotify and other platforms, the rollout starts the same day with “Artificial Narrow Intelligence (We Can Always Just Shut It Off)” followed by new promo singles every six weeks, leading up to the full streaming release on June 23, 2026.
Follow Macro/micro for news and updates:
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Find similar music in our Dark IDM, Glitch & Electro-Industrial and Dark Downtempo playlists.
We discovered this release via SubmitHub.
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