Most people tend to start out angry at injustice in the world, and then have that anger pared down by the passage of time until they’re playing golf and voting Conservative. Vladislav Delay, AKA Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti, has done the reverse. As Luomo in the mid-00s, he evolved the elegant minimal house that plays in cocktail bars into its ideal form. Sensual and subtly detailed, his tracks had a quiet toughness, but all certainly felt well with the world. His Vladislav Delay moniker was for even more beatific ambient techno. But by the time of his 2012 masterpiece Kuopio, its equally strong sister EP Espoo and the skittish jazz-techno fusion group Vladislav Delay Quartet, disquiet had crept in. The beats drummed like quick, nervous fingers on a tabletop, or a steady fist at a door.

Now, after a five-year break from solo releases spent on soundtrack work, Ripatti’s sound has modulated into full-blown rage and panic. Rakka was recorded after a period of reflection in the tundra of the Arctic circle, and, with its cover image of a landscape denuded of ice and snow, the climate emergency suffuses this record. Raajat is somewhat reminiscent of the exceptional Olari, from the Espoo EP, but the steady pulse has collapsed into arrhythmia, like an ecosystem thrashing around to regain equilibrium. Rakkine is thrilling and terrifying, a bit like a deconstructed version of the Prodigy’s Everybody in the Place where the breakbeats have spun out of control and the vocals sound more like transmissions from a military helicopter as it falls from the sky.

There are some moments of relatively steady rhythm on Rampa and Raataja, but it is techno of the most bludgeoning kind and, given the surrounding chaos, you can never settle into it. Just as the climate crisis can feel alienating in its scale and gravity, it is easy to recoil from this fire alarm of a record. Rhythm might perhaps have deepened its doom-mongering and made it more engaging. Then again, the apocalypse doesn’t care what you think – and, Ripatti seems to say, it’s already here.