Matthew Barnes, who records as Forest Swords, released Bolted on October 20, 2023, through Ninja Tune. It is his third studio album and it arrives six years after Compassion, his 2017 record. In that gap Barnes scored films, composed for video games, and designed live audiovisual systems for touring. Bolted carries all of that accumulated work inside it. It sounds like someone who has spent six years thinking very carefully about what sound can do before it becomes music, and then made something from the conclusions.
Forest Swords began in 2009 with cassette singles and self-released EPs that drew on the atmospheric coastal landscape of the Wirral, the peninsula between the Mersey and the Dee estuary west of Liverpool where Barnes is from. That geography matters and has mattered from the beginning. The music has always had something of the tidal in it: rhythms that feel like they are arriving from a distance, textures that settle and shift across long periods, a quality of patience that is not passive but that is doing something under the apparent stillness.
Bolted and What It Does Differently
Bolted is harder and more direct than its predecessors. Where Compassion and the debut Engravings moved in long atmospheric arcs, Bolted compresses that energy into tracks that are shorter and more rhythmically focused. The production is dense. Bass frequencies arrive without apology. Drums emerge out of industrial noise and disappear before you have fully registered them. This is music that does not negotiate with the listener about its terms.
The album opens without preamble and closes without resolution, which is formally correct for a record that is about accumulation and pressure rather than narrative or release. Bolted sounds like weather changing. You notice when it started only after it has already been going for some time. The eleven tracks move through territory that is at once electronic and physical, precise and unpredictable. Each one is brief enough to feel like a statement rather than a development, but the album as a whole develops in ways that individual tracks do not.
The Low and Sam Wiehl
The lead single from Bolted, "The Low," was accompanied by a video directed by Sam Wiehl, a UK visual artist and live AV designer who has worked with Barnes across multiple projects over the years. Their collaboration predates Bolted significantly. Wiehl designs the visual systems for Forest Swords live shows, works with Barnes on film and installation projects, and has developed a visual vocabulary that extends what the music does into image and motion rather than simply accompanying it.
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The "The Low" video operates inside the same territory as the music: dark, rhythmic, precise, uncomfortable in exactly the right way. Wiehl builds visuals that feel generated by the music rather than illustrating it. This distinction matters for an artist like Barnes, whose work is not about conveying images or stories but about producing states. The visual work serves that function rather than decorating it. The result is one of the more coherent artist and collaborator relationships in electronic music, built across years of shared development rather than assembled for a single release.
Neneh Cherry and Butterfly Effect
One of the most discussed moments from the Bolted campaign was the track "Butterfly Effect," which uses an unreleased archive vocal by Neneh Cherry. Cherry has been one of the defining artists of the last four decades, moving across funk, hip-hop, R&B, and art pop in ways that have influenced a substantial range of subsequent music. The vocal Barnes found fit the track with an uncanny precision: slightly raw, specific in tone, cut from a different era but completely present inside the Forest Swords context.
Using archive material is a choice that carries risk. It can feel parasitic or purely decorative. "Butterfly Effect" avoids both problems because Barnes integrates the vocal the way he integrates everything else: as texture and event rather than as centerpiece. Cherry's voice appears and recedes inside a production that does not stop for it. The effect is that the track feels inhabited rather than featuring. This is a meaningful distinction and not every producer manages it.
Scoring and the Expanded Practice
Barnes has worked extensively in film and game scoring during the period that separates his studio albums. This is not incidental to understanding Bolted. Scoring teaches composers to write music that functions at the edge of consciousness, that can support attention without commanding it, that can intensify feeling without explaining it. These are precisely the capacities that Bolted deploys across its eleven tracks.
The record also exists alongside a Bolted (Deconstructed) version, which strips some of the tracks back to more minimal forms. That supplementary version is interesting but not essential. Bolted is complete as it stands. The deconstructed version shows the architecture underneath, but the architecture was already visible to anyone listening with sustained attention. Barnes did not hide what he was doing. He just did not explain it.
What Bolted Builds Toward
Bolted is not an approachable record in any conventional sense. It does not offer comfort or resolution or the pleasurable predictability that much electronic music is built around. It offers instead a kind of productive pressure that is honest about what it is doing and why. Electronic music has many modes of address. Some records flatter the listener, give them a comfortable position, promise pleasure and deliver it on schedule. Bolted is not interested in that transaction and makes no effort to simulate it.
Matthew Barnes has made three studio albums across a decade of documented work, each distinct from the last, each reflecting a practice that extends beyond the studio into live performance design, film composition, visual collaboration, and sound installation. The six years between Compassion and Bolted were not years of silence. They were years of a different kind of work that fed back into the studio when Barnes was ready to return. Bolted is the result: compressed, hard, patient, and built with care that you can feel across every one of its eleven tracks. It continues to accumulate meaning after the listening ends.
