Mammo's Lateral Earns Early Praise as 2026's Best Dub Techno Album

Short Span writer David James has called Mammo's new album Lateral "a dub techno odyssey" and "potentially the best release of 2026 so far," a striking claim for a record that dropped just as clocks shifted forward for daylight saving time.

Lateral lands on Short Span across six sides of vinyl, a marathon physical format that suits the album's unhurried, detail-saturated approach. Short Span describes it as "a lush ambient techno long-player, blushing with chords and rich with nuance, seamlessly sound-designed to reveal a boundless wealth of detail unfurling along the x-axis," and frames the seasonal timing as no accident: "Released on the cusp of daylight saving time, this is the perfect album for the onset of spring, when the lengthening days leave more time to soak up the music's radiance."

The reference points are deep and specific. Pitchfork situates Lateral within "the scuff and interference of classic IDM, the swooning deep house of Larry Heard and Glenn Underground, and, most auspiciously, the dub techno of Basic Channel and its Chain Reaction imprint." Those are heavy touchstones, but Mammo's relationship to them is complicated in ways that make the record more interesting than a simple homage. In a rare interview cited by Pitchfork, the pseudonymous Italian producer admitted he discovered Basic Channel relatively late, and Pitchfork notes that "while you can see the influence, you can see points of divergence as well." The review observes that vintage dub techno was "grimy, barnacle-encrusted, and often user-unfriendly," implying Lateral occupies different emotional territory.

Track-level comparisons flesh this out. "Knuckles" draws on what Pitchfork calls "the entropic clanks of Torsten Pröfrock's Various Artists project," while "Vikare" is characterized as "a near dead ringer for the underloved Chain Reaction artist Vainqueur." Yet the album's beatific overall tone pulls it somewhere else, away from the punishing textures that defined the Chain Reaction catalog at its most austere. Short Span zeroes in on "4.1" and "Semni" as the clearest examples of this softer register, noting that their chord work could function as standalone ambient pieces with minimal rework.

Short Span does flag one caveat worth taking seriously: "though a patience tester in the vein of Cyrus' 'Enforcement' might've helped it feel a little more immersive, it's never anything less than a treat for the ears." That's a fair point. If you want Lateral to truly grip you the way the Chain Reaction catalog could at its most demanding, the album's "novocaine quality," as Short Span puts it, works more as seduction than confrontation.

This isn't Mammo's first time operating across different registers. Ulmeyda, released under the alias 2501, was described as "full of tangled constructions that creak like Alexander Calder mobiles in need of oiling," and Landmarks, released as Fabiano, was "an ambient immersion into inky darkness." Lateral sits apart from both: warmer and more approachable than either, and clearly a deliberate turn toward something more radiant.

For anyone tracking where dub techno is heading in 2026, Lateral is the record to be paying attention to right now.