Warp Records will reissue Drukqs on October 30, 2026, twenty-five years after Richard D. James released the most argued-over album of his career. The anniversary edition brings the record back to vinyl for the first time since its original run, and the centerpiece is on a clock. Pre-orders for the limited box set close on August 4, when Warp confirms the final manufacturing quantity at 12:01 pm GMT. Order through the official Aphex Twin store before that moment, and a box gets made for you. After that, the number is fixed.
The reissue covers four physical formats plus digital. The direct-to-consumer box set, sold through the artist store and Bleep, holds the album on four LPs alongside a six-panel poster and an AFX logo stencil, a nod to the original 2001 packaging: an oversized box closer to a chocolate assortment than a record sleeve, famous for fitting on no shelf and now commanding steep secondhand prices. A standard four-LP pressing on black vinyl arrives in a gatefold with polylined inner sleeves, joined by a double CD with an eight-page booklet and a double cassette. With this pressing, every Aphex Twin studio album is back in print on vinyl at once.
The new edition also grows the tracklist from 30 pieces to 35. Five additions close the record: dRuQks Prepared uN 1, three reworkings of Avril 14th (a half speed alternative version and a reversed version, both re-recorded to Nagra tape in 2009, plus a doubletempo, half speed take), and Mangle 11.
Drukqs arrived on October 22, 2001 as a 100-minute double album, and the story around it was as strange as the music. James said he pushed the release forward after leaving an MP3 player loaded with unreleased tracks on a plane, and the album was intended as his final release under his Warp contract at the time. The music splits down the middle. On one side sit drum programs of punishing density, Vordhosbn, Cock/ver10, 54 Cymru Beats, Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michaels Mount, built at a resolution few producers have matched since. On the other sit short pieces for computer-controlled piano, prepared with objects between the strings, along with ambient and electroacoustic sketches and one perfect domestic artifact: Lornaderek, thirty-one seconds of a birthday phone message from his parents, Lorna and Derek. Most titles are in Cornish, tying the album to the Celtic identity James has carried through his whole catalog. And near the front sits Avril 14th, two minutes of unaccompanied piano that went on to become one of the most widely heard pieces of music he ever made.
The album split its audience on arrival. Some heard a contractual clear-out of hard drive clutter. Others heard the full range of what one person could do with machines and a piano. Time settled the argument. Drukqs now reads as the closing statement of James' first act, the last Aphex Twin album before thirteen years of silence ended with Syro in 2014, and its piano pieces have traveled further into film, television, and sampling culture than almost anything else he has released.
The Drukqs 25th Anniversary Edition is available to pre-order now from the official Aphex Twin store, with all formats listed at Warp Records. The box set window closes August 4. Everything ships October 30.
