
The ninth Primal Scream album landed in 2008 amid a flurry of formula-breaking activity for the band; borrowing rooms, borrowing producers, borrowing sounds. Beautiful Future was split between Stockholm for the Bjorn Yttling sessions and London for Paul's Epworth's, and it's a bit of an outlier as well for its Fleetwood Mac 'Over & Over' cover, not to mention the Diana Ross fixation driving 'Uptown', both of which bring guest vocalists from Brazil and California.
So it's is less a unified statement than a series of well-executed references, clocking a band comfortable enough with their own legacy to ransack everyone else's. The production split between Epworth and Yttling gives the album two distinct registers, the former's tighter, more propulsive early tracks against the latter's more expansive Stockholm recordings.