7/10

Some albums document recovery from a safe distance, after the worst has passed and experience has settled into a coherent story. But 'Self Help Manual', the new record from Swedish electronic artist Autorhythm, feels far less tidy than that. Created across illness, treatment, sleepless nights and an eventual medical breakthrough, it captures survival while its meaning is still being understood.

Behind the project is Joakim Forsgren, who completed much of the album while living with a neurological condition severe enough to restrict his movement and return him to the care of his parents. Following a focused ultrasound procedure in Switzerland in February 2025, the majority of its physical effects subsided. And that context inevitably shapes the way 'Self Help Manual' is received, but the album is a work focused on regaining agency: over the body, over technology and over the future itself.

The electric bass takes a more prominent role than on his earlier work, inspired in part by the skeletal rhythmic intelligence of ESG and Liquid Liquid. His reduced dexterity became a creative boundary here, encouraging him to reconsider what a bassline needed to achieve. And that tension between physical restriction and musical release runs through the entire project.

Opening track ‘Symmetry’, created shortly before surgery, appears to establish the record’s emotional and structural extremes. Minimal in construction yet imposing in scale, it represents a moment when uncertainty remained unresolved. While at the opposite end sits the title track, the only piece made after the procedure. It even incorporates the sound of his former medication pump, transforming an object associated with dependence into part of a forward-looking composition.

Between those two points, 'Self Help Manual' moves through a broad network of references without losing its singular personality. ‘One’ has prompted comparisons ranging from Patrick Cowley and Air to an imagined meeting between Sly & Robbie and Kraftwerk. Such varied associations suggest music built from several overlapping histories, such as dub’s spaciousness, electro’s mechanical pulse, krautrock repetition and the warmth of groove-led dance music.

Elsewhere, ‘Inner Nile’ and ‘Delta’ look towards music from the Horn of Africa, first intuitively and then with greater deliberation. The artist acknowledges the distance between influence and mastery, yet that humility suits the exploratory character of the record. These pieces are not presented as authoritative statements, but as attempts to follow rhythm beyond familiar coordinates.

But ‘Longevity’ may offer the album’s clearest expression of renewed physical possibility. Its melody was shaped through an arpeggiator controlled by pressing different keys, a simple action that carried unusual emotional significance after a period when movement could not be taken for granted. The joy lies not only in the resulting pattern but in the ability to create it at all.

Completed with mixer Christoffer Roth and mastering engineer Rashad Becker, 'Self Help Manual' appears to preserve the intimacy of Forsgren’s process while giving its densely layered constructions definition.

But this release is not a polished tale of triumph or a set of easy motivational instructions. It's stranger, more personal and ultimately more convincing than that. Autorhythm has created an album in which adaptation itself becomes composition, turning damaged circuits, imperfect movement and reclaimed tools into a quiet declaration that the story is continuing.