By the release of its last album—a 2010 tribute to friend and label boss Tony Wilson—the Durutti Column seemed to embody more of Vini Reilly than his actual body. Perennially frail, sick, and gaunt, the ambient guitar composer had devoted his life to a sprawling catalog, some 40 albums wide, that resembles a matchstick model of paradise. Later in 2010, he had the first of three strokes. His fretboard-wandering fingers struggled to find their way home. “I carried on and on after my strokes and I got to a level [that was] not even close,” he told The Guardian in 2023, speaking with a resignation that bordered on torment. “I really can’t play guitar. It looks ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous.”

The rebirth of the Durutti Column suggests Reilly’s catastrophic imagination is just as potent as his world-building one. The band’s cult, long celebrated by Johnny Marr and John Frusciante, has recently ballooned to the point it can soundtrack fashion shows and, apparently, inspire a Harry Styles album. Renascent, a miracle of faith and circumstance, exists in large part thanks to Reilly’s long-serving percussionist and manager, Bruce Mitchell, and, compositionally, multi-instrumentalist Keir Stewart, whose co-writes include a dazzling new arrangement of the classic Durutti loosie “For Belgian Friends.”

Their stewardship likely extends to helping Reilly orchestrate his own thoughts. In 2013, after his third stroke, the beleaguered composer told the Quietus he had “complete pieces of music” in his head with “nowhere to go.” A decade later, the inverse problem: Coordination restored, he told Uncut, “There are no tunes happening in my head. There’s nothing of substance coming through.”

The trio has sporadically worked on Renascent since 2017. Reilly and Stewart picked up the pace during pandemic lockdowns, remote-working in charmingly anachronistic fashion: Parked outside Reilly’s kitchen, Stewart would track sessions from a recording desk squeezed into the back of his van. Despite the project’s associations with jazz, improv, and post-punk, Durutti Column transcendence rarely arises from a guys-in-the-room mentality; Reilly seems to compose in profound isolation, letting ambered reverb pool out from his fingers. New songs “Vapour in a Matchbox” and “Time Present and Past” re-awaken that Durutti Column promise to concoct minimalism, romanticism, and ambient into a sort of universal music.

Reilly has always written and released at the rapid pace of a man who expects somebody to come along and trample his plans at any moment. Despite its drawn-out creation, much of Renascent feels accordingly quick, steered by his instinct for improvised harmonic splatter snatched into the song from a parallel dimension. “Your Shadow at Morning” fires out astral flares that dance off into flamenco trills recalling his 1989 masterpiece Vini Reilly.

The pensive, prettier songs do not always play to his strengths. One of two vocal turns from his Manchester neighbor Caoilfhionn Rose, “Agonistes,” is a marvel, her swoons and wails duetting with ecstatic, skedaddling guitar figures. The other, “Sargasso Sea,” limpid and elegiac, has the purified air of those unsatisfying tribute concerts held—often posthumously—for leftfield artists at expensive venues. Reilly, who composed the song wholesale, seems content to swap his Satie-esque irresolution for something straightforwardly plaintive, like a lullaby.

When a singer makes a Vini Reilly song a little too beautiful, theirs is not the only voice I hear. As well as being Reilly’s champion and big-brother figure, Tony Wilson was a legendary hater who loudly decried his prize artist’s singing voice, including in the liner notes of his own reissue of Vini Reilly. (Some Durutti fans “like Vini’s singing,” he wrote. “But they’re off their heads.”) Wilson was wrong. To map out these heavenly realms takes a certain amount of ego and pollyannaism otherwise absent from Reilly’s worldview. His sing-speak, always low in the mix, like a fox scampering under a fence, offers a concession to material reality. Consider it an ancestor to the murmured symphonies of Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis and These New Puritans’ Jack Barnett, singer-composers who derive strength, counterintuitively, from oppression by their own environments. Wilson, who principally understood music as a vessel for star power, may have clipped Reilly’s wings even as he helped invent him.

The two most exquisite Renascent originals, “Liars” and “Scammer,” are sung by Reilly. On both, as ever, his illegible mumble suggests shame in his own voice, or even guilt about being here at all (some of his enduring illnesses relate to PTSD from cradling a dying friend in his lap after a gang attack as a teen). But as his guitar scratches away at Stewart’s velvet synths and glances off Mitchell’s drums, sing Reilly does. The man who might never have returned—who toyed with giving up because of how he looked holding a guitar—closes his eyes and nests in the nook of a daydream. “I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry,” he mutters on “Liars.” He seems to answer to, and on behalf of, all those who believed in him: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”