Alternate/Endings, the debut album from Sacramento, CA producer Lee Bannon does not mess around in letting you know what’s in store for the next sixty-one minutes. A voice bellows the title of opening track “Resorectah” before a hail of drum & bass beats batter in on top of the sampled voice, and that’s how the track continues for the next four minutes, save for a short ambient passage around halfway through that gives you time to pick yourself up off the floor. Subtle, it is not.

Although Bannon spent much of last year collaborating with the Pro Era crew and their de facto leader Joey Bada$$, there’s little hip hop to be found on this record. Alternate/Endings consists of drum & bass, dubstep and jungle, with a touch of atmospheric electro thrown in for good measure; there’s also a little trace of the Bay Area’s hyphy scene and Chicago’s footwork rhythms – the pace and intensity of this music is only matched in 2013 by DJ Rashad’s Double Cup, another record that’s indebted to d&b and dubstep.

Interestingly, for someone who’s indebted to beats Bannon has been very open in revealing that every track on the album started with a bassline from The Mars Volta bass player Juan Alderete. It’s a strange thing to admit, as on listening to Alternate/Endings it’s generally the beats that grab your attention, not the bass. Just listen to the incessant, jazzy drums on “Prime/Decent”: they dominate the track, only falling away briefly to highlight the cloudy synths, clubby female vox and muttered vocal samples, and it’s the same on a track like the extended jam of ‘NW/WB’. Having said that, the moody “Bent/Sequence” (Bannon loves himself a forward slash) does push Alderete’s bass to the fore, and it’s a track that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a London d&b club back at the turn of the century.

One thing that you can clearly notice is the cinematic quality of these tracks; Bannon cites Requiem for a Dream and There Will Be Blood as influences on the sound of this record, and when you listen to how a track like “216” builds then there are definite similarities. It starts with a creepy and intense piano suite (sampled from a piece originally played by Black Atlass), before moving into slo-mo beats and gradually ramping up the tempo and pace until it’s almost too much to take. And that’s a pattern followed by other tracks too; “Phoebe Cates” (damn, about time someone named a track after her) is heavy on the ambience and wordless, disembodied vocals before the beats slam in on top of twitchy synths, and the skittering beats of “Cold/Melt” – beats you just can’t get a hold on at all – are shot through with various unsettling noises that take the music a notch above your average jungle track.

Alternate/Endings is never a relaxing listen; when the breakneck pace drops, it’s only replaced by an unsettling calm, and one that doesn’t last very long. You know Bannon is going to drop another pounding rhythm in at any point, and more often than not that’s exactly what he does. I don’t think this is the record that’s going to break Lee Bannon; his work with Bada$$ is what’s going to grab him any mainstream attention. What’s going to be most interesting is how (or even if) he lets this music sneak into his collaborations – if Bannon does that, well, we might have some heady music coming in our direction.