The elusive Halls is a creator of his own blend of electronic music: music that is gloriously spacious, yet introspective and gripping. Almost two years in, the project finds its introverted protagonist Samuel Howard clutching an impressive self-titled and self-released EP, his double-sided single Solace/Colossus and a stash of credible remixes including those for his self-confessed objects of admiration Patten and Gold Panda.

Away from his bedroom – or indeed the university halls from which his moniker is derived – in Fragile Howard has created a series of interconnected looping cinematic soundscapes, which immediately bear witness to a new-found confidence and skill. At just 15 minutes long, with each track progressively increasing in length, Halls packs an astonishing amount of detail and texture into a short space of time. Fragile is a four-track exploration of the boundaries that Halls can push against: there’s certainly less crackle and fuzz than his previous ventures, and his vocals are more frequent and crisper, yet his lyrics remain subtle and indecipherable, a technique that feels entirely purposeful.

It is Howard’s vocals that truly add an affecting depth to music that would perhaps otherwise just rest succinctly within the dubious post-dubstep genre. Fragile also succeeds in reflecting a huge growth of confidence which has simultaneously allowed Howard to construct immense instrumental compositions, and also provided him with the self-assurance to apply his voice to his recordings. His vocals, however, are still always secondary to the driving beats that are cast over them, heard most obviously in ‘Sanctuary’ – the record’s repetitive, synth-soaked introduction. Swelling and replete with his muted vocals, it sweeps seamlessly into second track ‘Lifeblood’, which features a classical piano rather than the electronic keyboards that Halls is accustomed to. Meanwhile the deep, displaced vocals and bouncing-beat glitches make the track sound as though it could easily have been an outtake from Radiohead’s The King Of Limbs.

As the first song to be showcased prior to the EP’s release, third track ‘I Am Not Who You Want’ fits into the record as wonderfully as it did when originally played as a singular passage of music last year. It is within this particular track that Howard’s echoing vocals really stand out, with the pitch reaching haunting heights that are higher than the characteristic register that he tends to use through the rest of the EP. The sound of strings trickling through from the song’s background as the track progresses continues to deepen the sound, fostering Halls’ foray into the cinematic.

Fragile’s final track, ‘Fade To White’, begins with two minutes of repetitive eerie synth drones and faint syncopated beats, before a sole treble piano line comes into play, adding texture and contrast to the song’s backbone. Layers of throbbing percussion and jarring glitches become more apparent with each listen, and as the only song on the release to be entirely instrumental, it makes a fitting outro. It’s murky, but succeeds in expanding its spaciousness yet retaining its focus, and as the song ends abruptly – particularly when placed alongside the fluidity of the rest of the record – it is somewhat surprising.

While aesthetically, his artwork, videos and design are all in keeping with atmospheric, earth-orientated landscapes, musically too Fragile – as with Halls’ previous recordings – serves as a soundtrack to the gloomy winter elements. This uniformity of visuals and complementary sound is reinforced by the similar backing drone that is present throughout each track, as well as the gapless transitions between songs, all which accumulate to give a great sense of cohesion across the EP, and a body of music that works as a cyclical, continuous piece of composition. Enchanting and intricate, trance-like and translucent; together these distinctly different elements clash and create something beautiful – a collision of the ambient, whilst being wholly accessible. As its title suggests, Fragile is graceful, delicate and subtle. It harbours all the markings of Halls – past and present – and heralds a future for Howard as a British electronic mainstay.