Gi Gi’s ‘In Lieu’ Anchors Itself in the Warmth of ’90s-Era Electronica

Gi Gi has spent six LPs and two mixtapes refining a sample-based language that pulls from drum and bass, electroacoustics, and plenty of points between. His latest, In Lieu, feels less like a departure and more like a deliberate settling into a set of sounds he hasn’t foregrounded so directly before. The album leans into mellow psychedelia and a specific slice of 1990s electronic history, nodding to the era’s fractured subgenres without treating them as museum pieces.

Lead single “Pink Dirt” pairs live drum arrangements that echo late-’80s new wave with the spaciousness of dub. “Some Of” follows with horn lines structured like the jazz-inflected industrial pulse Meat Beat Manifesto popularized. That same coiled energy runs through “Separate Lateral,” where hypnotic staccato beats recall a period when hard-edged rhythm programming didn’t need to shout to command attention. Thick, chugging percussion from intelligent techno surfaces on “Acumen,” while “Harmless” hints at breaks without surrendering to nostalgia.

Trip-hop and acid jazz occupy significant space here. Opener “Optio” sets the tone with stutter-stepping beats and snippets of vocoded conversation, and “Going 2” pushes an insistent Latin rhythm that refuses to feel dated. There’s no attempt to inflate these ideas with distortion or volume tricks; the album trusts its sources. In doing so, it speaks just as comfortably to an audience that grew up with this music as to younger listeners discovering it for the first time. Gi Gi doesn’t frame In Lieu as a revival. He simply shows that these foundations still hold.