For his third album under the banner of Everything Is Recorded, producer and XL Recordings founder Richard Russell had nothing smaller than the very existence of humanity on his mind. On Richard Russell Is Temporary he taps a lengthy, wide-ranging list of collaborators—including Florence Welch, Bill Callahan, Sampha, Oscar-nominated actor Samantha Morton, and Kamasi Washington—to strip down their sounds and face life’s fragility head-on. While that existential uncertainty hangs over much of the sparse landscape of Richard Russell Is Temporary, unifying its many voices, so does the prospect of life beyond Earth. “‘Spirit,’ I think, is probably the simplest way of [saying] it,” said Russell. “So, when David Bowie passes away, everyone’s distraught because it turns out he’s temporary—but we shouldn’t be too surprised by that. We know that what he’s done is permanent. The influence of it, the love, the inspiration is there forever.” That ideal comes to the fore on the Callahan collaboration “Norm,” which pays tribute to the late cult-hero comic Norm MacDonald, and samples him riffing on mortality during a 2011 performance: “When the fuckin’ sickle of death is over my goddamn neck, I’m gonna be so cowardly. I’m afraid of going on Ferris wheels,” MacDonald cracks in irascible fashion, before Callahan swoops back in to note that his “voice and face live on” even after his 2021 death. Sampling his honesty about life’s last chapters was a reminder, Russell says, that “the humor is so important to everything—the humor is the sanity, just in life generally.” Richard Russell Is Temporary is a rare feat, an all-star album that feels born from a collective spirit of creativity and curiosity. “I don’t want to speak for any of my collaborators,” Russell says. “I got the feeling they were really enjoying participating in this project. Maybe that’s because they’ve all got their own careers, and your career comes with pressure—you’ve got to think about everything. In a situation like this, you don’t have to, because I’ve got to think about it. So, you get to come in the room and do it.”