UK Bass Merch · Updated July 2026
Actress Albums Ranked — Hazyville to Karma and Desire, the Complete Discography
Actress — Darren J. Cunningham, from Birmingham and based in London — has built one of the most formally uncompromising catalogues in UK electronic music. Six studio albums across fifteen years, each one advancing the same core project: electronic music as texture rather than rhythm, machine logic applied to emotional material, club music with all the club stripped away. This is the complete Actress discography ranked. For fans: the Actress merch collection — specifically the Ghettoville graphic tee — is the only dedicated Actress clothing available in the UK market.
6. Hazyville (2008)
The debut is the most conventional Actress record, which is still more abstract than most electronic music released in 2008. Working from Birmingham's industrial tradition and a deep knowledge of Detroit techno, Cunningham built a record that treated texture as primary material rather than backdrop. Hazyville doesn't resolve — tracks accumulate and dissipate without narrative arc. The production quality is rougher than the later records, which gives it a density the cleaner albums lose.
5. AZD (2017)
AZD arrived after the density of Ghettoville and moved in a different direction — shorter tracks, more explicit references to club music, a colour palette (the chrome aesthetic, the metallic production) that felt new without abandoning the Actress approach. Less emotionally demanding than the middle records, which makes it more accessible but slightly less essential. The production technique is the most sophisticated of any Actress album.
4. Karma and Desire (2020)
A significant turn — the first Actress album to use vocal contributions prominently (Zsela, Samantha Urbani, Mam-Ams). The vocals don't make the record more conventional; they make it stranger. Cunningham uses voice as he uses synthesiser — as one texture among many rather than as a centre. The result is an album that has the emotional register of a pop record while maintaining the structural logic of the Actress project. Released during the lockdown year, it found a large audience who had time to sit with it properly.
Shop — Actress Merch
3. Splazsh (2010)
The first major statement. Splazsh is where Cunningham found the Actress vocabulary — degraded synthesiser textures, rhythms that lag and accelerate independently, a sense that the music is processing itself. Tracks like Hubble, Maze and I.D. remain the most immediately recognisable Actress material. The album holds a specific place in the UK electronic canon: released in the same period as early Burial material and early James Blake, it represents one strand of the post-dubstep moment — the strand that turned away from beat-centricity entirely.
2. R.I.P. (2012)
The transition record. Between the relative warmth of Splazsh and the terminal bleakness of Ghettoville, R.I.P. holds both registers simultaneously. Tracks like Shadow from Tartarus and Marble Plexus have a grandeur that the later records abandon — a sense that the machine logic is engaged with something larger than itself. The production is the most precise of the middle period. Released on Honest Jon's, which understood what the record was better than most labels would have.
1. Ghettoville (2014) — The Definitive Record
Ghettoville was announced as the last Actress album — "the bleached out and black-boned extension of the Actress aesthetic, 30 years of decomposing culture reflected here" — and it functions as a terminal statement even now that Cunningham has continued working. Sixteen tracks, over an hour, no concessions. Club music in the same way that Tresor-era techno is club music — recognisable only in structure, stripped of everything that makes a dancefloor function. The closing track Rule is twelve minutes of filtered noise and displaced bass. It is, by some margin, the most demanding piece of music in the Actress catalogue and also the most complete expression of what Cunningham is doing.
The Actress Ghettoville t-shirt takes its graphic language directly from this era — decomposed structure, monochrome, the visual equivalent of the production aesthetic. The only dedicated Actress clothing made in the UK. Read our full Actress profile →
For listeners building through this catalogue: R.I.P. → Ghettoville is the core. Splazsh first if you need an entry point. The neighbouring records in the UK experimental canon — OPN and Djrum — represent the same refusal of easy legibility.
Shop — Experimental Electronic Merch
