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You must have heard of this one. The hype and the anticipation combined to make Left Behind a sort of thundering juggernaut, rumbling along the highway like the buildup to a massive and splodgy orgasm.

Left Behind is a nice album. Significantly – and thankfully – D-Nox and Beckers have “left behind” (a deliberate pun, methinks) their old sound. While an album of nine rehashes of Switch knockoffs would have been easier and, one would think, more commercially-rewarding, they’ve evolved their sound almost beyond recognition.

There are evident nods to the type of tech-house that Trentemoller and Mathew Johnson have made so fashionable over the last couple of years. Left Behind has a clean, jumpy sound to it that sometimes sounds fresh and enticing, and at other times sounds a little forced and awkward. One suspects at times that in their insistence to steer away from smooth-bottomed prog house, they put too much emphasis in making themselves sound like what they wanted to sound like.

In a sense, Left Behind is a masterstroke. The flow of the album is effortless: they capture a wide selection of different sounds and feelings here, mostly with nods of acknowledgement to their older sound.

Their remix of Tignino & Leo’s How Does It Feel takes care of the slutty electro, and What Is Real just about makes it despite a shockingly retarded vocal and its attempts to wreck the song, the album, and the entire history of music.

Arnousa is an obvious standout in terms of conventional progressive dancefloors; it’s a sort of a hybrid between the old style and the new, and when the Beckers-bassline drops it’s like manna from heaven. Pick Up and the remix of Wehbba’s Xceller8 are both in the quirky electro vein – the sort of thing that sounds fantastic right now, but it’s anyone’s guess how daft it’ll sound in three years time.

The dubbed-out masterpiece Changes brings the album to a close in style – this is a track that simply doesn’t go on long enough. The sounds are completely natural, the escalation is proper-trance hypnotic, and it sounds just as good whether you’re on a desert island, in a sweaty club, or shagging your bird on the bonnet of your Merc.

Left Behind sounds a bit like one of those albums that your non-psy mates might play you. The sort of mates who collect Dubfire live sets, or who talk rabidly about Sharam Jey on internet messageboards. In other words, I’m wondering whether it really is all that special in the context of what the rest of the electro/tech-house scene is doing. Another irritant is that the CD is mixed – if you want the unmixed tracks, head to beatport and melt the creditcard. The tracks are strong enough to warrant many wanting at least one unmixed, but the mixing itself on the CD is so sublime that digital customers may also want the physical product. This may be coincidence, it may be bloody good marketing, or it could be the first time a major release has truly embraced the technology of the times when it comes to product delivery. You work that one out.

The chief interest here is the way that D-Nox & Beckers have evolved their sound. It’s not just more mature, not just more subtle, not just more confident. You get the impression that the boys were up late creating this, genuinely excited at the sounds that they were producing.

When you take their long history of making decent noises with computers, add their eye-popping experience of playing all those big tunes to big dancefloors over the last couple of years, and stick in just about enough money to pay the mortgage and not have to get the big guns blazing, evidently you set the stage for a cracking record.

It may not be a classic in years to come, but right now it is. Bloody well done.