Twenty-five years is an awful long time in electronic music – but that’s how long Simon Green, aka Bonobo, has been applying his beat making craft. Working from the early days with Tru Thoughts, where he established himself as an original producer capable of incorporating different styles and cultures into his work, Green has extended the spirit of collaboration to instrumentalists and vocalists alike.

On his watch the careers of singers such as Andreya Triana have been enabled to flourish, with Green’s talent of writing for the singer as much as the song a key feature of his work. With his live following now at a feverish peak, where do we find Bonobo’s music a quarter of a century on?

The answer from Distance In Static is that his style is still recognisable, Green often studied and moody in his introverted instrumental asides, but that there is an increased urgency and intensity added to the vocal collaborations and the instrumentals he calls ‘desktop bangers’.

Both are in evidence here, on an album that bodes extremely well for the autumn world tour. On the inward-looking side falls Always On Your Side, a surprisingly restrained number featuring Joy Crookes, but whose soulful substance becomes ingrained on repeated listening, the radio friendly production making it a natural single. Arooj Aftab is also restrained but a compelling presence on Fire on the Water, singing in Urdu about how “my heart aches for the one who is standing furthest away”.

As so often with Bonobo’s work, he has chosen the lyrical counterparts well. The broken beats are an ideal complement for Nicole Miglis, whose heartfelt plea “Don’t Make It Lonely” cuts through, while Youth’s Fountain finds Nilüfer Yanya fronting an instinctive and colourful group of musicians. With beats stilled, Japanese vocalist Ichiko Aoba contributes the dreamy Equinoctial.

The notable difference on this album is the tempo shift for the instrumentals, which crackle with atmosphere and fire that appear to have been stoked by an extended recording session at Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch studio in California. Cycles is an urgent early breaker, one of several potential dance floor anthems whose numbers are completed by the buzzing bass break of Uncasually, the superb Shokoufeh, with its ornamented strings and dappled piano, and the quickfire Me and You, its beats dancing around a 1950s sample of Hugh Tracey in Malawi. Their presence is more immediate than on previous albums, with some chopped-up work suggesting Green is mindful of the ability of Caribou and Bicep to up the ante.

The album flows really well, best experienced in full – and is definitely a singular whole rather than a composite playlist. Perhaps this is because Green has hinted it might be the last conventional Bonobo album, with possible format or design innovations seemingly towards the front of his mind for the future.

If that is the case, then Distance In Static is a fine way to finish this particular chapter. Its global outlook is at once reassuring and also thought provoking, in a world seemingly determined to stoke and monetise division rather than celebrate differences. Bonobo is most definitely in the united camp – and increasingly you’ll find him celebrating that towards the middle of the dancefloor.