The first sound on Max Richter’s new album is the ocean, slowed and processed until it pulses like a heartbeat. It was shaped at Studio Richter Mahr, the studio he runs with the visual artist Yulia Mahr on 31 acres of Oxfordshire woodland, and it sets the terms for everything that follows on While The Flood Rages: natural sound bent to the needs of a machine, then answered by an orchestra and a choir.
Released on 16 October, While The Flood Rages is drawn from Richter’s score for MaddAddam, the three-act ballet he made with the choreographer Wayne McGregor from Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of novels. It is not a soundtrack. “I took the material apart and created a trajectory that makes sense just through listening,” Richter said in the album’s announcement from Deutsche Grammophon. “It’s a different way to reach the same destination.”
From a Ballet Score to a Standalone Record
MaddAddam is a co-production between the National Ballet of Canada and The Royal Ballet. According to Studio Wayne McGregor, it had its world premiere on 23 November 2022 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, and the Royal Ballet says its own premiere run in London sold out in 2024. The ballet compresses all three of Atwood’s novels, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, into one evening about extinction, invention and what survives a collapse.
It is Richter and McGregor’s third major collaboration, after Infra in 2008 and Woolf Works in 2015. The label says the project was first developed before the Covid-19 pandemic and then delayed by it, which gives the record an odd double timing: music conceived as a warning, released into a world that has since lived through part of the story. As the reviewer Richard Allen notes at A Closer Listen, Atwood’s books describe a “waterless flood”, a metaphor for corporate greed, ecological collapse and plague.
Deutsche Grammophon describes the album as 15 tracks in three acts. On vinyl, A Closer Listen reports, each act takes one side, and the fourth side carries an etching rather than music. Richter scores for orchestra, choir, electronics and recorded sound, and Apple Music’s listing credits the Tenebrae Choir alongside him.
Act One: An Ocean, a Machine and a Falling Piano Line
The opening, Wave After Wave, is that processed ocean turned into a rhythmic pulse. The Line of Best Fit hears something older inside it: the theme of Europe, After the Rain from Richter’s first album, Memoryhouse, from 2002, given what its reviewer calls a darker, much more threatening rendering nearly a quarter of a century later.
Their Eerie Music changes the source material entirely. According to the label, it was built from electromagnetic recordings of the internal technological systems found around the studio, so the hum of the building’s own machines becomes the material. The Line of Best Fit hears its gentleness as the voice of the engineered, benign new species in Atwood’s books, while Allen hears it plunge into a glitch that recalls a bank of dial-up tones.
The title track then narrows the frame to something intimate, a calm piano melody that holds on to human connection while larger systems start to fail. The City Was A Chaos stacks dense, overlapping structures into a sense of overload before Quiet introduces the simple falling piano motif that runs through the whole record. The Line of Best Fit hears an echo of On the Nature of Daylight, from The Blue Notebooks in 2004, in that motif, and it is the thread a listener can follow through all three acts.
Act Two: Bees, Gunfire and a Choir
The second act opens out. Tell The Bees leans pastoral, with a soft, almost folk-like warmth carried by the buzz of bees. Then Data Ballistics cuts across it. Its rhythms, the label says, were constructed from manipulated gunfire, and The Line of Best Fit hears in it the guns of media-reported war zones shooting the bucolic calm to pieces.
It is the most percussive passage on the album, and it is also where the choir arrives. In Oh Let Me Not Be Proud, voices and electronics meet in an uneasy truce. A Sweet Air brings back an altered version of the falling motif from Quiet, and in Amniotic, as Allen hears it, human voices take over the part the bees once played, a quiet nod to the bioengineering at the heart of Atwood’s trilogy.
Deutsche Grammophon presents Richter as a composer known for blending traditional orchestration with modern electronics, and most of the album works in that space. The decision to make a rhythm section out of gunfire goes further. It is a production choice as much as a compositional one, and it is the moment the album’s argument becomes hard to ignore.
Act Three: Dawn, Radiation and the Final Chorus
The closing act, beginning with Dawn, weaves all the sonic elements together. The label describes choir, orchestra and electronics folding into one another, and A Closer Listen singles out harp, brass and bells finally wrestling back control. Background Radiation follows with what The Line of Best Fit calls Geiger-like sonics, which its reviewer reads as life adapting even in poisoned ground, in the way nature has returned around Chernobyl.
After My Body Is My Earthly Ark, the album ends with its first single, Now We Can Sing. Built from the same recurring piano motif, it opens into a choral-led reflection on voice and connection, inspired directly by Atwood’s text. In The Line of Best Fit’s account, the electronics almost completely give way to an orchestral crescendo. Allen points out that this is where Richter departs from Atwood, whose ending is more fragile, and argues that the bolder close underlines that the album is Richter’s own vision rather than an illustration of the books.
What the Critics Heard
Early reviews have been warm. The Line of Best Fit gave the album 8/10, writing that Richter’s “fine sense of dramatic structure over three Acts ensures it never drifts into the hubristic”. Clash called it typically masterful, adding that “Richter’s melodic flair results in a record defined by potent world-building”. Allen closed his review at A Closer Listen with a line that sums up the project: “While Atwood uses words, Richter proves himself to be a storyteller through sound.”
The recurring praise is for balance. The album moves between delicacy and violence without settling into either, and the falling piano line gives listeners a way through the denser passages. The Line of Best Fit adds that no deep knowledge of Atwood’s novels is needed, since the accompanying booklet supplies the narrative for anyone who wants it.
Listening Rooms Instead of a Launch Party
Richter chose an unusual way to mark the release. The label announced WTFR Global Listening Events, a network of intimate sessions inspired by the listening-bar culture of Tokyo, London, Seoul, Copenhagen, New York and Melbourne, in which cafés, wine bars and hi-fi venues become temporary listening rooms and guests are asked to disconnect from their devices.
It suits an album built around the idea of a room. Some records are shaped by the place they were made, much as Ezra Collective made most of a UK No. 1 album in a week at Miraval, and While The Flood Rages is a reminder that a studio can be an instrument too, down to the electromagnetic hum of its own equipment.
Where While The Flood Rages Sits in Richter’s Catalogue
The album follows two very different solo records, In A Landscape in 2024 and The New Four Seasons, his reworking of Vivaldi, in 2022, as The Quietus notes. It also arrives in a busy year for Richter. Deutsche Grammophon says he was made a CBE and received the Berlinale Camera for his contributions to music and film, and his score for Chloé Zhao’s film Hamnet earned an Oscar nomination. His catalogue has passed four billion streams.
For newcomers, While The Flood Rages works as a single sitting rather than a set of tracks, and the label’s track-by-track descriptions make a useful map. Start with Wave After Wave and Quiet to hear the two building blocks, the processed ocean and the falling piano line, then let the three acts do the rest. You can find the full tracklist on Apple Music.
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