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German-born British composer and pianist Max Richter is a pivotal architect of contemporary post-classical and minimalist music. Fusing classical composition, electronic textures, and narrative structure, Richter has produced numerous monumental solo works, the most striking of which include The Blue Notebooks (2004) and Sleep (2015), as well as celebrated reimagining projects such as Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons (2014). A prolific composer for stage and screen, his long-standing stage collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor has yielded acclaimed, multi-disciplinary narrative scores, including Infra (2010), Woolf Works (2017), and now While The Flood Rages.

The album derives from Richter’s third major collaboration with McGregor: MaddAddam, a ballet co-commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Opera House. The stage production and music are, in turn, inspired by author Margaret Atwood’s dystopian speculative fiction trilogy of the same name. Rather than just pressing "record" on a direct ballet score recital, Richter took the material apart to shape it into a standalone, continuous listening experience for release as an independent music album. The novels, ballet and score engage with ecological crisis, technological acceleration, and societal collapse, while celebrating the irrepressible human spirit that is evident in human acts of carving out space human care, tenderness, and reflection. 

Spanning 15 tracks across three acts, the album adopts a parallel structure to the novels. Richter fuses piano motifs, orchestra, electronics, and vocal contributions from groups like the Tenebrae Choir. Somewhat incongruously, the release is accompanied by a limited-edition crossword puzzle book featuring newly commissioned essays exploring the record's themes.

Musically, While The Flood Rages might surprise even close followers of Richter, whose catalog has frequently been dominated by quiet, ambient works such as Sleep (2015), Voices (2020), and In A Landscape (2024). The work opens with "Wave After Wave," a short sequence of pulsating, abrasive sounds that give way to the deep, Górecki-like orchestral swell of the piece itself. Symmetrically, this is followed by the moody "Their Eerie Music," the outro of which uses dystopian electrical interference and resonant gongs. The repetitive motif of "While The Flood Rages" builds steadily in intensity, though perhaps not as menacingly as one might expect. This task is left to its successor, "The City Was A Chaos," a graduated musical progression built upon the sound of metallic industrial percussion. The sequence is indicative of the structure of the complete work, as it explores the breadth and scale of Atwood's original vision. 

Far from the serene calm of his ambient works, While The Flood Rages shows Richter at his theatrical best.