"How to replace it" is the 8th album of the Belgian outliers dEUS

As the title suggests, Tom Barman’s Belgian art-rockers struggle to map fresh routes on their first album in 10 years. They were in the midst of the most fruitful spell of their career before the extended hiatus but if 2012’s Forgotten Sea was often driven and outgoing, dEUS’s eighth album is self-reflective and – occasionally – self-defeating.

The doomy title-track promisingly suggests an album of apocalyptic self-doubt set to a cinematic backdrop, though goof-outs Simple Pleasures and Cadillac tap known appetites for oddball abstraction with diminishing returns. With opacity furnishing dead-ends, dEUS are more interesting when they lean into melody and emotion, as on the bluesy Must Have Been Now and liquid-funk stand-out 1989, where Barman affectingly recalls the “weightlessness” of youth. While much of the album’s latter half is sketchy and forgettable, tender piano ballad Love Breaks Down suggests there’s life in dEUS yet, if they could embrace the new more readily.