Almost forty years ago, a young Brian Eno, still just two years removed from his glam days in Roxy Music, put out a record called “Another Green World” that fused the sound of early minimalist pioneers like Steve Reich, the impressionist music of Debussy and Ravel, and his own off-kilter brand of pop music. Now 62, Eno has come a long way since that 1975 masterpiece—producing some of the most important records in recent times, collaborating with the likes of John Cale, David Byrne and U2, and gaining a reputation in his home country of England as a political thinker—yet on “Small Craft on a Milk Sea,” his 24th solo album and first for influential electronic label Warp Records, we find Eno is back on that other green world again. Except, this time around, the world isn’t quite so green anymore—lush forests have been replaced with punishing desert wastelands, lapping waves turned into swamps, and dark radiation permeates.

Opener “Emerald and Lime” and the two pieces that follow it lull the listener into a false sense of security with pastoral, reverb-drenched piano and layers of ambient sonics. The bulk of the album, however, consists of short, fast-paced compositions which on one level serve as statements on the pioneering IDM of early Warp artists—who, after all, took a heap of influence from Eno— and, on another, represent some of the darkest music Eno has made since 1982’s “Ambient 4: On Land,” a template for the dark ambient that Lustmord, Thomas Köner and other musicians would craft a decade later. Tracks like “Flint March,” “Horse” and “Dust Shuffle” suggest vivid, nightmarish imagery uncharacteristic of Eno—and, therefore, much welcomed. Promotional single “2 Forms of Anger” is maybe his first song since the glitter rock days of “Here Come the Warm Jets” and “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)” that channels those albums’ energetic youth. The first half of “Anger” is pure tension, with electronic musicians Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams, co-collaborators on the album, providing a short, repeated rhythm that builds subtly—when, halfway through, both guitar and drums explode like a rocket, and Eno, who has spent the last couple decades mired in a sluggish string of solo releases (see: 1997’s “The Drop,” 2005’s “Another Day on Earth”) suddenly sounds like he’s having fun again.

By the time we get to the final third of the album, a bookend of the ethereal, piano-driven pieces that started it, everything just feels like comedown after the narrative climax of “Anger” and "Shuffle." At 15 songs, “Small Craft” is an exercise in quantity over quality, and this has its drawbacks; compositions come and go before they have time to leave a lasting impression, and a few of the later pieces are flat-out underwhelming. It does end on a strong note, however, with the 8-minute “Late Anthropocene,” which perhaps best encapsulates Eno’s overarching approach to music: the art of painting a picture with sound. On "Small Craft," he proves he is still up to the task.