Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery

The Artist

The Comet Is Coming is a London-based cosmic jazz trio formed around saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, keyboardist Dan Leavers (known as Danalogue), and drummer Max Hallett (known as Betamax). Hutchings, a central figure in the UK jazz renaissance of the 2010s, also leads Shabaka and the Ancestors and Sons of Kemet, giving him an unusually wide footprint across contemporary jazz. The trio's sound fuses jazz improvisation with synthesizer-heavy electronic music, krautrock motorik rhythms, and the apocalyptic energy of free jazz — creating something that feels equally at home in a club or a concert hall. Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery is their debut full-length studio album and the record that brought them to an international audience.

The Album

Released in 2019 on Impulse! Records — the storied label of Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders — Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery carries the weight of that lineage while sounding entirely contemporary. The album was produced by the band alongside longtime collaborator Speakeasier, and leans heavily into synthesizer textures and pulsing electronic grooves as the scaffolding for Hutchings' saxophone improvisations. Recording choices favor density and atmosphere, with Danalogue's synths often functioning as both rhythm section and orchestral color simultaneously. Thematically, the album is a spiritual and cosmological journey — grappling with creation, time, collective consciousness, and the cyclical nature of existence.

Listen For

Synthesizer architecture. Danalogue's keyboards do far more than accompany — they generate entire worlds of texture, from churning bass pulses to shimmering astral pads. Notice how the synths create momentum and atmosphere that would typically require a full band.

Shabaka Hutchings' saxophone. Hutchings moves fluidly between lyrical melodicism and free, overblown intensity — sometimes within the same track. On "Summon The Fire," listen for how his phrasing builds from measured statements into something genuinely ferocious.

Rhythmic drive and release. Betamax anchors the album with a relentless, almost motorik pulse that gives the improvisations a propulsive forward energy. Pay attention to how the album's structure alternates between peak intensity and moments of cosmic drift, particularly on "Astral Flying."

A vocal incantation. "Blood Of The Past" introduces a vocal element that shifts the album's register from purely instrumental into something more ritualistic and communal. It's one of the record's most arresting moments — unexpected and deeply felt.

Themes of time and transformation. The album frames existence as cyclical rather than linear, with tracks like "Because The End Is Really The Beginning" and "Timewave Zero" treating time itself as a subject. Listen for how the titles and musical moods reinforce one another to build a unified cosmological narrative.