EKHO Sonic Chill #11

alt-J. Formed in Leeds in 2007, won the 2012 Mercury Prize with their debut, An Awesome Wave. Folk harmonies, glitchy electronics and art-rock, folded into something unmistakably their own. 'Hunger Of The Pine' was the lead single (released 19 June 2014) from their second album, This Is All Yours, and one of the songs the trio wrote after bassist Gwil Sainsbury left in January 2014. It samples Miley Cyrus's line 'I'm a female rebel' from her 2013 track '4x4'. Keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton has said it's about how missing someone, pining, can be a physical pain much like hunger. This Is All Yours debuted at No. 1 in the UK and was Grammy-nominated for Best Alternative Music Album. Frontman Joe Newman's debut solo album as JJerome87, The Canyon, got its wide release in June 2026.

Warpaint. Formed in Los Angeles in 2004: Emily Kokal, Theresa Wayman, Jenny Lee Lindberg and, since 2009, drummer Stella Mozgawa. Known for hypnotic, bass-led grooves and interlocking vocals. 'Keep It Healthy' comes right after the short intro on their self-titled second album (Rough Trade, January 2014). Flood produced it, Nigel Godrich mixed two tracks, and the artwork's by the director Chris Cunningham. It was the first record the current four-piece wrote together from the ground up, and it went to No. 9 in the UK. Later records include Heads Up (2016) and Radiate Like This (2022), and they marked their 20th anniversary with the singles 'Common Blue' and 'Underneath' in 2024.

Film School. Shoegaze out of San Francisco, now split between SF and Los Angeles, founded in 1998 by singer Greg Bertens. Their debut Brilliant Career (2001) was made with members of Pavement and Fuck, and a 2006 self-titled album on Beggars Banquet got them wider notice before they went quiet in 2011. They reunited in 2014 and have since put out Bright to Death (2018), We Weren't Here (2021) and Field (Felte, 25 August 2023), home to 'Is This A Hotel?'. Field layers echoes of krautrock under the guitar haze, and Bertens has credited bassist Justin Labo's melodic ideas and drummer Adam Wade's unexpected rhythms as central to its sound. A Field deluxe edition followed on 5 September 2024.

Yndling is the solo project of Norwegian singer and songwriter Silje Espevik, based in Oslo. Dream pop with shoegaze haze and trip-hop drum programming, and she cites Mazzy Star, Slowdive and Cocteau Twins as touchstones. The title track of her third album (released 6 November 2025, made with co-producer Adrian Einestor Sandberg) leans toward trip-hop. She called it 'trip hop with happy chords', drawing on Massive Attack and Portishead as well as Erika de Casier, and said it's about 'feeling a relationship coming to a natural end... but still wanting to stay in it a little bit more.' Her single 'Shell' followed on 18 September 2026.

Daniel Land & The Modern Painters grew out of Manchester's gay clubbing scene. Land and guitarist Graeme Meikle met on Canal Street and started writing songs in 2002 on a four-track at Land's home. 'Codeine' is one of those earliest songs, held back for years until they could record it properly for their album Love Songs For The Chemical Generation (Saint Cecilia, November 2009). That's a 12-track shoegaze record of character sketches from Manchester's gay scene, with literary nods to T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Wordsworth. German electronic musician Ulrich Schnauss worked on two of its tracks, adding synths and effects. Land has since put out music under his own name, including the charity singles 'Snowdrops' (April 2026) and 'Marsha' (July 2026), with a new album announced for early 2027.

Jane Weaver. Born in Liverpool, grew up in Widnes. She fronted the Britpop band Kill Laura and the folktronica group Misty Dixon, then went solo, moving from psych-folk into cosmic, motorik space pop. She runs the Bird Records imprint and broke through with critics on The Silver Globe (2014), Piccadilly Records' Album of the Year. Flock (Fire Records, 5 March 2021), recorded at Eve Studios in Stockport and produced with Henry Broadhead and Andy Votel, was her most pop-leaning record. It draws on Lebanese torch songs, 1980s Russian aerobics records and Australian punk. It scored 85 on Metacritic and became her first UK Top 40 album, at No. 24. Then came Love In Constant Spectacle (2024, produced with John Parish), and she sang with the BBC Concert Orchestra at the 2026 BBC Proms.

Wu-Lu is the recording name of Miles Romans-Hopcraft, out of Brixton, South London. Genre-agnostic music that splices punk urgency into dub, trip-hop, grunge and hip-hop production. 'Habesha' is an early, self-released piece: out as a single on 23 February 2018, then track 2 of his EP N.A.I.S. (2 March 2018), whose Bandcamp notes call it 'a jazzy and melancholic trip-hop groove.' N.A.I.S. drew on South London's jazz scene, with contributions from Joe Armon-Jones of Ezra Collective and bassist Giles Kwake, who's played with Sampha and Kate Tempest. He went on to sign with Warp, and his 2022 debut album for the label, Loggerhead, scored 83 on Metacritic. Bakerz Dozen, a collaborative EP with POiSON ANNA, came out on Warp on 5 June 2026.

Fredrik was a Swedish band out of Malmö, started by Fredrik Hultin and Ola Lindefelt as a side project of their electronic duo The LK. Lush, many-layered chamber folk with electronics and group harmonies, recorded in their own garden studio. Their debut Na Na Ni (2008) got attention in the US, Stereogum named them a 'Band to Watch', and in 2010 they played an NPR Tiny Desk Concert behind Trilogi, a concept album in three parts inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. 'White On White' comes from the three-track Origami EP (late 2010), the first Fredrik release with singer and multi-instrumentalist Anna Moberg. Pigeons & Planes wrote about its 'wintry chimes, and soothing choirs.' It came ahead of their final album, Flora (2011). Fredrik stopped in 2016.

Shallou is producer and singer Joe Boston, who grew up in Rockville, Maryland outside Washington, D.C. He went to Loyola University New Orleans, moved to Chicago to produce, and is now based in Los Angeles. Inspired as a teenager by James Blake and Gold Panda, he makes soft, melodic ambient house with soulful vocals. 'Begin', featuring the singer Wales, came out in 2017 and was on his EP All Becomes Okay (Sleeptalker, May 2017). It reached No. 43 on the US Dance chart. He later signed to Island Records for his debut album Magical Thinking (2020), then put out The Long Way Home (2021) and In Touch (2023).

Night Tapes. London-based trio: Estonian singer Iiris Vesik with Max Doohan and Sam Richards. They started as housemates jamming in South London in 2019 and make hazy dream pop laced with electronics and trip-hop. 'loner' came out as a single on 2 February 2024 and led into the EP assisted memories (Nettwerk, 7 June 2024). It's about the line between solitude and isolation, drawn from Vesik's move from Tallinn to London. Nathan Boddy mixed it and Matt Colton mastered it. Their debut album portals//polarities came out on Nettwerk on 26 September 2025, and in spring 2026 they supported The Neighbourhood on a European tour.

a.s.o. is the Berlin-based duo of two Australians: singer-songwriter and actor Alia Seror-O'Neill (who records as Alias Error) and Melbourne producer Lewie Day, better known as Tornado Wallace, whose releases include records on ESP Institute, Beats In Space and Running Back. They met by chance in Berlin in 2020 and made what their own Bandcamp calls 'trip-hop torch songs for club freaks'. Slow, cinematic and dubby, pointing to Julee Cruise, Cocteau Twins, Fleetwood Mac and Portishead. 'My Baby's Got It Out For Me' is track 2 on their self-titled debut album (Low Lying Records, 2 June 2023), a song about the push and pull of an avoidant lover. A remix set, a.s.o. remixed, followed on 25 October 2023.

James Blake. Singer, pianist and producer from Enfield in north London who came up through the London dubstep scene and turned it into something far more intimate and soulful, starting with his self-titled 2011 debut. 'Retrograde' was the lead single from his second album Overgrown. It premiered on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show on 7 February 2013 and came out on Polydor on 11 February, and Overgrown went on to win the 2013 Mercury Prize. The song's had a long life on screen, including the extended trailer and pilot of HBO's The Leftovers. In 2024 he left Polydor to release music independently, and his seventh album, Trying Times, came out on Good Boy Records on 13 March 2026.

Lana Del Rey, born Elizabeth Grant in Manhattan and raised in Lake Placid, New York. More than a decade refining cinematic, slow-burning Americana pop, from Born to Die (2012) through Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019) and Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (2023). 'Say Yes To Heaven' has a long back story. She wrote it with Rick Nowels in 2012 for Ultraviolence, recorded it in November 2013, and it was reworked for Honeymoon and Lust for Life without making any of them. It leaked in 2020, a sped-up version took off on TikTok, and Polydor and Interscope surprise-released it on 19 May 2023. It hit No. 9 in the UK, No. 54 on the Billboard Hot 100 and went Gold in the US. In 2026 she put out the Stove single 'White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter' (17 February) and the James Bond video-game song 'First Light' (16 April), and on 15 July 2026 she said Stove was nearing completion alongside a companion album.

Diplo is Thomas Wesley Pentz, born in Tupelo, Mississippi and raised mostly in Miami, where the local Miami bass scene shaped him, before he made his name as a DJ and producer in Philadelphia. Long before Major Lazer, Jack Ü and Silk City, his debut album Florida (Big Dada, 2004) was a sample-rich instrumental hip-hop and trip-hop record. 'Into The Sun' is one of its few vocal tracks, sung by Bristol-raised Martina Topley-Bird, best known for her work with Tricky. Diplo says he made Florida 'between a small apartment in Philadelphia and my mother's house in Florida,' working late nights and riding buses with headphones on. Big Dada expanded it into F10RIDA for the album's tenth anniversary in 2014.

Dido, born Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong in Kensington, London. She came up singing on her brother Rollo's Faithless records before her debut album No Angel made her one of the biggest-selling British artists of the era. No Angel came out in the US on Arista/Cheeky on 1 June 1999, and in the UK on 16 October 2000. It went 10x platinum in the UK and 4x platinum in the US, sold about 15 million copies worldwide, and won British Album of the Year at the 2002 Brits. 'Honestly OK' is track 7, an album cut, not a single, written by Dido, Rollo and Matty Benbrook and produced by Dido and Rollo. Folktronica and trip-hop, a minimal vocal over an electronic dub backdrop. Her solo album Still on My Mind (2019) reached UK No. 3. A 25th-anniversary No Angel vinyl came out on 19 September 2025, and she sang on a new version of Faithless's 'Find a Way' released on 4 September 2025.

The Daysleepers. Shoegaze and space-rock out of Western New York, led by singer, guitarist, keyboard player and producer Jeff Kandefer, with Scott on bass and Mario on drums. Kandefer started the band around 2003-04 because he couldn't find enough new bands making shoegaze the way he wanted to hear it. They debuted with EPs including The Soft Attack, then the 2008 album Drowned in a Sea of Sound, which the shoegaze site Somewherecold called 'arguably one of the best shoegaze albums ever released.' After roughly a decade away they came back with Creation (My Daydream Records, 7 September 2018), a self-produced concept album about the universe and its creation that Kandefer started in his home studio in late 2016. Wall-of-sound epics, ambient pieces and new-wave cuts. 'Flood in Heaven' is its eighth track.

The Sundays grew out of the partnership of singer Harriet Wheeler and guitarist David Gavurin, who met at Bristol University in the mid-1980s. They became a London band in 1988 with Paul Brindley on bass and Patrick Hannan on drums. Jangling, airy guitar pop and Wheeler's weightless voice took them from Rough Trade to the 1990 debut Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, whose lighter-than-air guitar pop influenced the nascent Britpop scene. 'Goodbye' is the opening single and track 2 of the second album Blind, co-produced by the band and Dave Anderson and put out by Parlophone on 19 October 1992 (Geffen/DGC in the US the next day). Blind reached No. 15 in the UK. Their third album, Static & Silence, came out in 1997, and drummer Patrick Hannan said in a 2020 podcast that Wheeler and Gavurin 'never stopped making music.'

Jinsang is Benjamin (Ben) Tran, an independent, California-based beatmaker and one of the best-known names of the 2010s lo-fi hip-hop wave. He started making beats at fifteen, in his first year of high school, and he makes hazy, sample-based instrumentals. solitude., his fourth solo project, is 26 short, warm instrumentals that took about half a year of 'digging samples and crafting'. He produced, mixed and mastered it himself, and 'reminisce.' is one of its miniatures. It came out digitally on 16 January 2016, with a cassette on DirtyBeauty that August. His 42-track album Perspective, beats made between 2020 and 2025, came out on 27 June 2025 with a limited vinyl run.

Lusine is Jeff McIlwain, a Dallas-born, CalArts-trained electronic producer based in Seattle, and a Ghostly International mainstay since 2003. "Panoramic" opens his 2013 album The Waiting Room, a record that pushed his mix of IDM, techno and melodic electro-pop toward looser, hands-on analog jams. Alongside albums like Serial Hodgepodge, A Certain Distance and Sensorimotor, he co-scored David Gordon Green's film Snow Angels (2007) with David Wingo. His tenth album, Melting Days, came out on Ghostly on 21 August 2026. It's a return to the rhythm-forward ambient sound of his early work.

Locust is the long-running project of Mark Van Hoen, a Croydon-born electronic musician who signed it to Belgium's R&S Records in 1993, first working with vintage analog synths and tape machines. Morning Light (1997, on R&S's Apollo imprint) is where Locust turned toward pop song structures and vocals, with singers including Craig Bethell and Zoe Niblett and guests including Neil Halstead of Slowdive. Van Hoen produced and mixed it at Pravda Studio in London. He later partnered with Halstead in Black Hearted Brother (Stars Are Our Home, 2013). A new Locust lineup played its first show in 2025, and the album Spectral+ came out on TODO Records in September 2026.

Thievery Corporation. Rob Garza and Eric Hilton, a duo out of Washington, D.C., formed in summer 1995 at the city's Eighteenth Street Lounge. They bonded there over dub, bossa nova, jazz and club culture, and launched their own ESL Music label in 1996. "Heaven's Gonna Burn Your Eyes" opens their third album, The Richest Man in Babylon (2002), sung by Icelandic singer Emiliana Torrini, and the album reached No. 2 on Billboard's Dance/Electronic Albums chart. Their catalog runs from The Mirror Conspiracy (2000) to Radio Retaliation (2008, Grammy-nominated for its packaging) and Saudade (2014). Hilton has also put out solo albums, including Sound Vagabond (2024) and A Sky So Close (February 2026).

Chastity Belt formed in 2010 in Walla Walla, Washington, while all four of them, Julia Shapiro, Lydia Lund, Hunter Truscott and Gretchen Grimm, were students at Whitman College. They've been a Seattle band ever since, same lineup the whole way. "Drone" opens their second album, Time to Go Home (Hardly Art, 2015): chiming, reverb-washed guitars and wry lyrics that turn a humorous eye on feminine stereotypes. It scored 78 on Metacritic. Later albums include I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone (2017), the self-titled Chastity Belt (2019) and Live Laugh Love (2024), which Stereogum named Album of the Week. They released the singles "I Could Say Less" and "Pavement" on 10 September 2026.

Mood Rings were a five-piece out of Atlanta, Georgia: William Fussell, Tymb Gratz, Christopher Alley, Peter Cauthorn and Seth Bolton. Shoegaze haze mixed with post-punk rhythm. Stereogum called it "dreamy post-punk." After the 2011 EP Sweater Weather Forever they signed to Mexican Summer for their only album, VPI Harmony (2013), which AllMusic praised for its "oddly luxurious feel." "Pathos y Lagrimas" was the band's second single, featured in Converse's "Ready, Set: Get Lost" music series in 2012. They split in 2015, and Fussell moved to London and went on to record alt-country as Honey Harper.

Bowery Electric were the New York duo of Lawrence Chandler and Martha Schwendener. They met while working at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, formed the band in late 1993 and debuted at Brownie's in January 1994. Their second album, Beat (Kranky, 1996), recorded at Studio .45 in Hartford and co-produced with Rich Costey, fused shoegaze guitar drones with samplers and programmed breakbeats. A bridge between post-rock and trip-hop. The Wire called it "genre-defining," it spawned the 1997 remix album Vertigo, and "Without Stopping" itself was remixed by Witchman. The band's been dormant since 2000's Lushlife. Chandler went on to study composition at Juilliard and Goldsmiths, and Schwendener became an art critic for The New York Times.

My Precious Bunny is the solo project of Lily Wolter, one half of Brighton dream-pop band Penelope Isles with her brother Jack. Born and raised on the Isle of Man, she started the project at 16 under the name KookieLou, and wrote most of the songs during lockdown at her parents' home in Penzance, Cornwall. Her debut album A Moment in My Eyes came out on Bella Union on 22 May 2026, co-produced with Allister Kellaway (Last Living Cannibal). It's full of analog synths, saxophone and choral layers. "KookieCannibal" was its second single, with Jack Wolter singing on the chorus.

Trifonic is the Los Angeles electronic project of brothers Brian and Laurence Trifon, formed in 2005. Brian had been a guitarist and programmer for BT, working on his 2006 album This Binary Universe. "Parks on Fire" comes from their debut album Emergence (2008), a blend of downtempo, dub, IDM, post-rock and ambient, reissued in 2018 as a 10th-anniversary special edition with remixes from Hybrid, Hecq and The M Machine. The follow-up, Ninth Wave (2012), had "Santa Rosa," licensed to CSI, and Brian co-founded game-music company Finishing Move, which scored Halo Wars 2. The three-track Hyperreality single came out in July 2025.