Behold: one of the most depressing records of the year. A collaboration between American poet Matt Finney and Ukrainian composer Heinali, Lemonade is a staggeringly, unrelentingly bleak affair. The layering of Finney’s angst-ridden spoken word contributions over Heinali’s cavernous, droning ambience is strikingly reminiscent of a inferior version of Nine Inch Nails’ more oblique outings. These nine tracks form a sort of self-lacerating suite, the music forming a relatively coherent – if amorphous – whole and Finney’s gravelley suicide-noir sprinkled relatively randomly across the top, forming not an understandable narrative but rather adding to the aimless atmosphere of dread and self-destruction.

On its own terms, Heinali’s music is as difficult to criticise as it is to pinpoint its specific sounds. At times these atmospheres sound like a perfectly serviceable film soundtrack, incidental music which would suit the discovery of a grisly murder scene in a grim cop procedural but which wouldn’t be expected to endure in the memory for even a second after the sequence’s conclusion. Fans of ambient music will find the instrumental aspects of Lemonade to be perfectly serviceable too, even if they are many superior ambient options available.

It is on Finney’s shoulders that the criticism predominantly falls. His bored drawl utters tens of phrases, jumbled up in that patchwork order, which all seem delicately calculated to evoke in the listener some recombinant of guilt, shame and hopelessness. It’s all very well, but as influenced as Finney appears to be by Trent Reznor, his angst is a great deal less articulate and involving. Not only does the scattershot delivery of these broken lines limit their impact, but the lines themselves range from intriguingly unsettling (occasionally) to almost comically trite and pretentious (often). There are moments when we find ourselves suspecting and/or praying that Finney will suddenly burst into laughter, announce that the whole thing was a joke and launch into an a capella revamp of “Walking on Sunshine” or something.

Lemonade, then, is a record which will fascinate a few, annoy many and bore most. If the idea of a guy telling you, over some average ambient drone, that “the only thing left to paint your walls with is blood” really appeals, then you should leap at the chance to hear this record. If not, then there are far better ways to occupy your music listening time, whether you’re of the ambient persuasion or not.