Thirty years after Bowery Electric released Beat, a new review in Pitchfork makes the case for an album that never much wanted to be noticed. The record, by the New York duo of Martha Schwendener and Lawrence Chandler, arrived in 1996, and the critic Sadie Sartini Garner, writing Sunday, called it music assembled in layers rather than in motion.

Garner traces the method back to Public Enemy. Kevin Martin, a contemporary of the band who recorded with GOD and Techno Animal and now works as The Bug, told the critic Simon Reynolds that he took his cue from how the Bomb Squad’s Hank Shocklee built songs, in Reynolds’s words, as skyscrapers rather than scrolls, with a “production [that] situates a song’s dynamic in the vertical, not the horizontal.” The track “Postscript” is the clearest case, Garner wrote, but much of Beat works that way.

Garner’s closest modern comparison is DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…. Both records take a form so popular that its workings went unnoticed and turn those workings into the subject: Shadow’s busy, upbeat percussion never broke his album’s air of foreboding, and Beat pools shoegaze, post-rock, trip-hop and ambient into one continuous, hard-to-name thing.

The review also maps what came after. Mogwai, who released their debut the year after Beat and once shared a bill with Bowery Electric, struck the same unassuming, tense poses before erupting. The pessimism humming under Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s F♯ A♯ ∞ and Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada seems drawn from the same bank as the drones Chandler sends across the record, and somewhere in the folds of the music sits a fiber of an idea Sigur Rós would spin out on ( ) less than a decade later. None of this made Beat a landmark in its day, Garner argued, “because this is an album that sometimes seems as if it doesn’t want to be seen at all, much less identified as a wayfinder.”

All 10 tracks feel set in still, solitary places: a city at 4:30 a.m., a lonely bedroom, an office at night, a vacant warehouse. Music, as Garner put it, made for places where people should be but aren’t. Released while the young internet was promising to bring everyone closer, the album caught the pessimism about connection that was already settling in.

The record flirts with feelings it then withholds: the brain of dance music without the movement, the texture of trip-hop with no charge, shoegaze squalls too exposed to get lost in. “Listening to Beat, you are exposed,” Garner wrote. “Which is to say, you can only be sure of what you are not.”