Jon Hopkins on Immunity and the Necessity of Abrasion

The arc of Jon Hopkins’ fourth album, Immunity, is a study in deliberate whiplash. It opens with a stretch of aggressive, distorted techno before pivoting into hushed piano pieces, a structure the producer saw not as contrast for its own sake, but as a psychological tool. “I think you need to shake someone out of the state that they’re in in quite an aggressive way, then soothe it,” Hopkins told the NME, describing the album’s often sudden pivots from abrasion to calm.

The sharp edge of that first half was carved with a specific set of tools. His vintage Korg MS-20 synthesizer provided a raw signal chain, but it was the Soundtoys Decapitator plugin that often set it on fire. Hopkins would export audio from Logic Pro, manipulate it in other software, then return it, building complex effects chains where distortion was less an effect than a structural element.

This methodology was inseparable from the recording’s intimate counterpoints. The percussive attack of processed electronics stood shoulder to shoulder with the creaking felt of his Yamaha upright piano, captured close-miked with the practice pedal permanently engaged. The sound is hushed, almost voyeuristic, and intentionally placed. For Hopkins, the abrasive first half wasn’t a separate statement; it was what made the quiet tracks capable of landing.

The process was immersive to the point of obsession. “I was just euphoric. The only problem is that it’s just impossible to sleep,” he said. That intensity is baked into the record’s earliest moments, long before the public caught up with the work. Tracks from his earlier albums, Contact Note and Insides, had already gestured toward these extremes, but Immunity didn’t just cross genre lines—it insisted on their irrelevance. The goal, he told The Line of Best Fit, was simply “to make things that are emotionally powerful in some way.” A decade on, the record’s restless, needling tension still refuses to let anyone mistake him for a chillout act.