EKHO Sonic Chill #4

N.A.S.A. stands for North America/South America: it's the duo of Los Angeles producer Sam Spiegel (then working as Squeak E. Clean, billed since 2020 as Sam i) and Brazilian DJ Ze Gonzales (DJ Zegon), who came up as the DJ for Planet Hemp, one of the biggest hip-hop acts in 1990s Brazil, and in 2012 co-founded Tropkillaz. Their one album, The Spirit of Apollo (Anti-, 2009), took five years to assemble and is rooted in Brazilian funk under an astonishing guest list: Kanye West, David Byrne, Tom Waits, M.I.A., George Clinton, Karen O, Method Man and more, with the stated mission of showing that music can bring people together across borders and genres. 'Way Down' pairs Wu-Tang's RZA with Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante and singer Barbie Hatch. Spiegel, who is Spike Jonze's brother, went on to score commercials, and his music for the Kenzo World ad won gold at Cannes Lions; Rolling Stone's 2008 Hot List dubbed him 'King Sam'.

Night Tapes are a London-based dream-pop trio: Estonian singer Iiris Vesik with British producers Max Doohan and Sam Richards, who started the band as evening jam sessions while sharing a house in South London in the late 2010s. Their sound is hazy, cosmic indie pop built on what they call multi-fidelity recordings, with Vesik's rich, soaring falsetto out front. After a run of EPs (Dream Forever in Glorious Stereo, 2019; Download Spirit, 2020; Perfect Kindness, 2023; assisted memories, 2024) they released their debut album portals//polarities on Nettwerk in September 2025; 'television' was released as a single. In January 2025 they won a Music Moves Europe Award at Eurosonic Noorderslag, the EU's prize for the continent's best emerging acts, representing Estonia; Vesik herself had earlier placed fourth in Estonia's Eurovision selection Eesti Laul, in 2010, with a song she wrote at 18.

Radiohead are the Oxfordshire five-piece of Thom Yorke, Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Philip Selway, one of the most acclaimed rock bands of the last 30 years. 'Knives Out' comes from Amnesiac (2001), the album drawn from the same 1999-2000 sessions that produced Kid A, and it is the most guitar-driven, Smiths-like song on a record otherwise full of electronics and jazz colors; Johnny Marr himself praised its guitar work for capturing his old band's melodic feel. Famously, this deceptively simple song took the band 373 days to finish, and its Michel Gondry video was shot in a single continuous take. The single reached number 13 in the UK and number 1 in Canada, and Amnesiac went to number 1 in the UK and number 2 in the US. After a seven-year break from touring, Radiohead played 20 arena shows across five European cities in late 2025, selling tickets through a registration system designed to keep bots and touts out, and in 2026 said they plan to tour a different continent each year from 2027.

Yppah (it's 'happy' spelled backwards, said 'YIP-ah') is Joe Corrales Jr., a Long Beach-based producer and multi-instrumentalist who started out playing guitar and bass in rock bands and DJing in the turntablist crew The Truth. His records fold shoegaze, 1960s psychedelia, soul and post-rock into warm, reverb-soaked downtempo, and he plays most of it himself. He released three albums on Ninja Tune (You Are Beautiful at All Times, 2006; They Know What Ghost Know, 2009; Eighty One, 2012), then Tiny Pause (Counter, 2015) and Sunset in the Deep End (Future Archive, 2020). 'Never Mess With Sunday' was written for Ninja Tune's 20th-anniversary XX box set in 2010, and its guitar line went on to be sampled in Lil Peep's platinum-certified 'Star Shopping'; Houston guitarist Mark Speer played in his live band and toured with him in 2010 alongside Laura Lee, the two who went on to form Khruangbin. Yppah's music has been placed in House, CSI, Altered Carbon and the film 21.

The Fauns are a Bristol shoegaze/dream-pop band formed in 2007 around singer Alison Garner, bassist Michael Savage and drummer Guy Rhys-Davies, with guitarist Will Slater. Their self-titled 2009 debut was released with almost no promotion on their own Laser Ghost label, yet it sold more than 5,000 copies on word of mouth alone, championed by BBC 6 Music's Steve Lamacq. 'Fragile' is the album's delicate centerpiece ballad, and it drew a remarkable admirer: film composer Clint Mansell (Requiem for a Dream, Moon) remixed it for a Record Store Day 12-inch on Invada in 2013. Their second album Lights (2013) and third, How Lost (January 2024), both came out on Invada, the Bristol label co-run by Portishead's Geoff Barrow, with the newest record adding electro and disco pulses under the guitar haze.

Hird was the alias of Christoffer Berg, a keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist from Gothenburg, Sweden, who was only 21 when his lone album Moving On came out in 2004 on Stockholm's Dealers of Nordic Music, the label behind the Nordic Lounge compilations. His sound is warm, modal-jazz-flavored downtempo and light house. Singer Yukimi Nagano, a school friend from Gothenburg, was already known from Koop's Waltz for Koop and went on to front Little Dragon, the Grammy-nominated band that appeared on two tracks on Gorillaz's Plastic Beach, both co-written by Nagano; 'Keep You Kimi' is the vocal version of 'Keep You Hird', which Berg built from an idea he first had at around 15. Berg retired the Hird name in 2007 and became a sought-after studio hand: he mixed The Knife's Deep Cuts, worked closely with Fever Ray, and was hired as full-time programmer on Depeche Mode's Delta Machine (2013). He has also produced house and techno under the Mountain Range alias, and Nagano released her debut solo album, For You, as Yukimi in 2025.

Beach House are the Baltimore dream-pop duo of Paris-born singer and organist Victoria Legrand and guitarist Alex Scally, together since 2004. Legrand comes from musical royalty: her uncle was the Oscar-winning film composer Michel Legrand and her aunt Christiane Legrand sang with the Swingle Singers. Their music is slow-burning, organ-and-guitar reverie, and 'Black Car', with its cold pulsing synth, is one of the darkest cuts on 7 (Sub Pop, 2018), their seventh album, co-produced with Spacemen 3's Sonic Boom, mixed by Alan Moulder and recorded over eleven months starting in their own Baltimore studio; it reached number 20 on the Billboard 200. Key records include Teen Dream (2010), Bloom (2012), Depression Cherry (2015) and the double album Once Twice Melody (2022), and their 2015 track 'Space Song' became a sleeper phenomenon years later, charting on the strength of hundreds of thousands of TikTok videos and a Netflix Wednesday sync. The band played festival dates in 2025 and said that year it hoped 2026 would bring both more touring and a new record.

Massive Attack are the Bristol collective that more or less invented trip-hop: Robert '3D' Del Naja and Grant 'Daddy G' Marshall, with Andrew 'Mushroom' Vowles until 1999. Mezzanine (Circa/Virgin, 1998) is their darkest and biggest record, debuting at number 1 in the UK and topping charts in Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, and it introduced Cocteau Twins singer Elizabeth Fraser as a collaborator on 'Teardrop', 'Group Four' and 'Black Milk', where her wordless, otherworldly voice drifts over a slow, sinister groove. For the album's 20th anniversary in 2018 Mezzanine became the first album ever encoded into synthetic DNA, its audio stored across 920,000 DNA strands by scientists at ETH Zurich, an archive designed to last thousands of years. Del Naja is also a pioneering stencil graffiti artist whom Banksy has credited as an inspiration. In April 2026 the band released 'Boots on the Ground', a collaboration with Tom Waits billed as the first of several new releases, and toured Europe and Australia that summer.

Slowdive formed in Reading, England in 1989 around Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell, who had been friends since the age of six, with Christian Savill, Nick Chaplin and Simon Scott completing the classic line-up. Their sound is the textbook shoegaze wash of reverb-soaked guitars and blended boy-girl vocals, and this track is the outlier that points somewhere else: Halstead has said he was drawing on Aphex Twin, dub and early drum-and-bass when he wrote it. Souvlaki (1993) was shrugged off by the British press on release (one critic said he'd rather drown in a bath of porridge than hear it again), yet it has since been ranked the second-greatest shoegaze album of all time by Pitchfork, and Brian Eno liked the band enough to play on two of its songs. Creation dropped them a week after 1995's Pygmalion and they split, but they reunited in 2014, and their 2023 album Everything Is Alive gave them their first top-ten album in the UK and several other countries, thirty-plus years into the story.

Doves are the Manchester trio of Jimi Goodwin and twin brothers Jez and Andy Williams, who first hit the UK top three in 1993 as the dance act Sub Sub before a 1996 studio fire wiped out their tapes and gear and, in effect, gave them the reset that produced Doves. The sound is widescreen, melancholic northern rock with the rhythmic pull of their club past, and 'Darker' is a brooding, bass-led B-side from the Lost Souls era that later found a second life on the soundtrack of the TV series 24. Lost Souls (2000) went platinum in the UK and was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, and the band went on to score two UK number-one albums (The Last Broadcast and Some Cities). Their 2025 album Constellations for the Lonely reached number five in the UK and number one in Scotland, and drew a Metacritic score of 82, an unusually strong critical run for a band three decades in. Goodwin sat out the 2025 tour for that album while the rest of the band toured it.

Cocteau Twins came out of Grangemouth, Scotland, where Robin Guthrie and bassist Will Heggie formed the band in 1979; Elizabeth Fraser became the singer, and Simon Raymonde replaced Heggie on bass in 1983. The name was lifted from an early Simple Minds song. They are the founding text of dream pop, and Fraser's lyrics range from plain English to abstract mouth music built from foreign words she chose without knowing their meaning, which is why The Telegraph called her 'the voice of God' and why 'Cico Buff' sounds like it does. Blue Bell Knoll (1988) was their first record to get major-label distribution in the US through Capitol, reached number 15 in the UK, and gave 'Cico Buff' its own promo video. The band ended in 1997, but the members never went quiet: Fraser sang lead on Massive Attack's 'Teardrop', released a Sun's Signature EP in 2022 and performed with Massive Attack on their 2024 and 2025 tours, while Raymonde co-founded Bella Union, the label that discovered Fleet Foxes and John Grant. A planned 2005 reunion was cancelled when Fraser withdrew.

The Dining Rooms are the Milan duo of DJ/producer Stefano Ghittoni and guitarist Cesare Malfatti, who formed in 1998 and have been the house band of Italy's Schema label ever since. Malfatti also co-founded La Crus, one of the most respected Italian songwriter bands of the 1990s, and the pair make cinematic downtempo that folds jazz, hip-hop, dub and folk into slow, smoky grooves. Tre came out in 2003, and their music has turned up on TV series including Sex and the City, CSI and Six Feet Under. Their catalogue was considered strong enough that in 2009 Schema had Christian Prommer's Drumlesson re-record a whole set of their tunes with a live jazz band, marking the duo's first decade. Their albums include Turn To See Me (Schema, 2022) and Songs to Make Love To (2024).

Tricky (Adrian Thaws) grew up in Knowle West, Bristol, and left Massive Attack to make Maxinquaye (1995), the album that defined trip-hop and is named for his late mother, Maxine Quaye. Martina Topley-Bird, then a Clifton College schoolgirl, became his vocal foil after he found her sitting on a wall near his house singing to herself. 'Ponderosa', co-produced with Howie B, rides a drum loop lifted from the 1993 Bollywood film Khalnayak, a sample choice nobody else in Bristol was making. Maxinquaye reached number three in the UK, was named album of the year by NME, Melody Maker and The Wire, and was Mercury-shortlisted; Topley-Bird went on to earn her own Mercury nomination for Quixotic (2003) and to sing with Gorillaz and Massive Attack. Tricky announced his fifteenth studio album, Different When It's Silent, for July 2026 on his False Idols label; Topley-Bird's most recent album is Forever I Wait (2021).

Nadine Shah is from Whitburn, near Sunderland in the north-east of England, the daughter of a Pakistani father and an English mother of Norwegian descent, and she left for London at 17 to sing jazz before finding her own darker, drum-driven art-rock voice. Critics routinely reach for PJ Harvey and Siouxsie Sioux to describe the theatrical, low-register power of her singing. 'Fool' comes from Fast Food (2015), her second album with producer Ben Hillier, which gave her her first UK chart entry; its follow-up Holiday Destination (2017) earned a 2018 Mercury Prize nomination. She has become an outspoken advocate for musicians' welfare and mental health, and 2024's Filthy Underneath drew some of the best reviews of her career. She is based in Newcastle.

Hooverphonic formed in October 1995 in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium, around songwriter-bassist Alex Callier and guitarist Raymond Geerts, with Liesje Sadonius singing on this first album; they were briefly called Hoover, a name they dropped partly over potential trouble with the vacuum-cleaner maker. The debut A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular is lush, sample-built, string-swept trip-hop, and its single '2Wicky' landed in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1996 film Stealing Beauty, which is how a band from a small Flemish town found a worldwide audience. 'Barabas', written by Callier, was pulled as a single in 1997. They went on to become the first Belgian act to headline the Rock Werchter festival (2001), wrote the opening-ceremony music for Euro 2000, scored a European hit with 'Mad About You' (2000), and represented Belgium at Eurovision 2021. Long-time singer Geike Arnaert rejoined in 2020, and the 2024 album Fake Is the New Dope reached number four in Belgium.

The Marías formed in Los Angeles in 2016 after Puerto Rico-born, Atlanta-raised singer María Zardoya met drummer-producer Josh Conway at the Kibitz Room in Canter's Deli, where she was playing and he was running sound, and the two started writing almost immediately; Jesse Perlman (guitar) and Edward James (keys) complete the band. Their sound is hushed, jazz-tinged bedroom pop that drifts between English and Spanish, and Superclean Vol. I (2017) grew out of recordings first intended for TV projects that never materialized. The self-released start led somewhere big: they were featured on 'Otro Atardecer' from Bad Bunny's Un Verano Sin Ti, which was in the Album of the Year race at the 2023 Grammys, and 'No One Noticed' from 2024's Submarine climbed to number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100. At the 2026 Grammys they received their first nomination, for Best New Artist.

The Cinematic Orchestra is the London project of composer Jason Swinscoe, who founded it in 1999 on the Ninja Tune label, blending live jazz players with sampling, strings and downtempo electronics. Ma Fleur (2007), an album dealing with themes of loss and love, went on to be certified Silver in the UK. 'That Home' is a short, stripped-back companion to the album's opener 'To Build a Home', featuring Montreal singer Patrick Watson; that song has since travelled everywhere from Grey's Anatomy and This Is Us to a trailer for Homeland, while the group's 'Arrival of the Birds' soundtracked Neil deGrasse Tyson's viral 'Most Astounding Fact' video. Earlier, the group composed and performed a full live score to Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent classic Man with a Movie Camera, released as an album in 2003. Their most recent studio album is To Believe (2019).

Tracey Thorn, from Brookmans Park in Hertfordshire, England, is one half of Everything but the Girl with Ben Watt, whom she met at the University of Hull; their 1995 Todd Terry remix of 'Missing' went top three in the UK and to number one in several countries. Out of the Woods (2007) was her first solo album in 25 years, following 1982's A Distant Shore, and it reached number 4 on the US Top Dance Albums chart. 'Hands Up to the Ceiling' is one of its quiet, self-written ballads and name-checks her post-punk heroes Terry Hall, Edwyn Collins and Siouxsie Sioux. Beyond her own records she co-wrote and sang Massive Attack's 'Protection', and she is a Sunday Times bestselling author whose memoir Bedsit Disco Queen (2013) was followed by further books including Naked at the Albert Hall and My Rock 'n' Roll Friend. Everything but the Girl returned in 2023 with Fuse, their first album in 24 years.

Warpaint are a Los Angeles band formed on Valentine's Day 2004 by childhood friends Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman with bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg; Australian drummer Stella Mozgawa joined in 2009 and completed the lineup. Their sound is hypnotic, interlocking dream-rock built on the interplay of three voices and Lindberg's melodic basslines. 'Love Is to Die' was the lead single from their self-titled second album, which the band co-produced with Flood, who also mixed most of it, with two tracks mixed by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich; the album reached number 9 in the UK and number 43 on the Billboard 200. Their very first EP, Exquisite Corpse, was mixed by Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante. They marked their twentieth anniversary in 2024 with the singles 'Common Blue' and 'Underneath'; their most recent album is Radiate Like This (2022).

Clams Casino is Michael Volpe, a producer from Nutley, New Jersey, whose hazy, choir-and-808 sound helped define what became known as cloud rap. Around April 2009 he built 'I'm God' at home around a sample of British singer Imogen Heap's 2005 song 'Just for Now' and emailed it to rapper Lil B after reaching him through MySpace; Lil B's version appeared on the 6 Kiss mixtape that December, and the beat became Volpe's best-known work. Imogen Heap liked what he had done with her voice and was happy for it to be released as long as she was credited, and the instrumental was finally released officially on 24 April 2020 on the compilation Instrumental Relics, going on to be certified Gold in the US in 2024. Volpe also produced 'Palace' and 'Demons' on A$AP Rocky's breakthrough LIVE.LOVE.A$AP.

Thievery Corporation are Rob Garza and Eric Hilton, who met in the summer of 1995 at Washington, DC's Eighteenth Street Lounge over a shared love of dub, bossa nova, jazz and reggae, and launched their own ESL Music label the following year. Their sound is a globe-spanning downtempo blend of those influences with a rotating cast of vocalists. The Richest Man in Babylon (2002), their third album, reached number 2 on the US Dance Albums chart and sold 25,000 US copies in its first month; 'Omid', whose title means 'hope' in Persian, is sung by LouLou Ghelichkhani, one of their longest-running collaborators. The duo later earned a Grammy nomination for Radio Retaliation (2008), in the Best Recording Package category, and opened for Paul McCartney in 2009. Their later albums include Midnight Ragas (2025) and A Sky So Close (2026).

Damu The Fudgemunk is Earl Davis, a producer, DJ and multi-instrumentalist from Washington, DC, who co-owns the vinyl-focused label Redefinition Records and first surfaced as half of the duo Y Society with rapper Insight. His sound is warm, sample-driven boom bap: crunchy drums, chopped soul and jazz loops, and horn lines layered into small narratives. 'Tea Thyme' comes from How It Should Sound Volume 1 & 2, the collection of his earlier beats that Redefinition released in 2010. Proof of his range: Ocean Bridges, an improvised album recorded in 2019 with jazz saxophone legend Archie Shepp and rapper Raw Poetic, came out in 2020, alongside a string of other collaborations with Raw Poetic. His later releases include Away Back In (2023) with Raw Poetic and Peace of Action (2024).

Nouvelle Vague was founded in Paris in 2003 by producers Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux with a single idea: reimagine post-punk and new wave songs as hushed bossa nova, sung by a cast of mostly French female vocalists. The name is a triple pun, meaning 'new wave' in French, nodding to the French New Wave cinema movement, and translating the Portuguese 'bossa nova.' Their self-titled 2004 debut, cut in eight months, had sold more than 200,000 copies worldwide by 2006; the Clash's 'Guns of Brixton', written by Paul Simonon and one of the first songs the project was built around, becomes a whispered, sun-dazed lullaby in the hands of singer Camille, who performed four songs on the album before her own celebrated solo career. Their most recent album is Should I Stay or Should I Go? (2024).

LEISURE are a six-piece soul-electronic collective from Auckland, New Zealand, formed in 2015 after a group of already-established Auckland musicians (from Kids of 88, Goodnight Nurse, Cool Rainbows and others) spent a spontaneous holiday writing songs at a beach house in Muriwai and found the chemistry too good to waste. The sound is sun-warmed indie soul: laid-back grooves, glossy guitar lines and airy group vocals. Key records are the self-titled debut (2016), Twister (2019), Sunsetter (2021, the album 'Be With You' comes from), Leisurevision (2023) and Welcome to the Mood (September 2025), all via Nettwerk. What started as a side project produced an Australian Gold and NZ Platinum single in 'Slipping Away' (2020), and keyboardist/producer Josh Fountain has also produced for pop artist BENEE. 'Diamonds' from Welcome to the Mood reached number 28 on the NZ Hot Singles chart in 2025.

Prefab Sprout come from the village of Witton Gilbert in County Durham, north-east England, built around songwriter Paddy McAloon, his brother Martin on bass and singer Wendy Smith, with the name simply invented by McAloon because he liked how the two words sounded together. Their music is literate, jazz-tinged sophisti-pop with some of the most admired lyric writing of the 1980s; Rolling Stone profiled McAloon in 1991 under the headline 'The Last Pop Genius'. Steve McQueen (1985), produced by Thomas Dolby and retitled Two Wheels Good in the US, is the landmark, followed by From Langley Park to Memphis (1988) and Jordan: The Comeback (1990). Dolby became their producer after praising their 1984 single 'Don't Sing' on BBC Radio 1's Roundtable, which led the band to contact him; 'Goodbye Lucille #1' was retitled 'Johnny Johnny' for its 1986 single release. McAloon stopped performing live in 2000 and records entirely on his own terms, but the catalogue is still tended: the 2007 Steve McQueen reissue added his solo acoustic re-recordings, and since 2023 Martin McAloon has toured the songs as a solo artist.

The Radio Dept. are from Lund, Sweden, named after a local petrol station that had been turned into a radio repair shop, and are led by Johan Duncanson and Martin Larsson (now Carlberg) with Daniel Tjäder on keyboards. Their sound is hushed, hazy dream pop: soft-focus guitars, drum-machine pulse and melodies that feel like memories, which is why Sofia Coppola used three of their songs in Marie Antoinette (2006). Key records are Lesser Matters (2003), Pet Grief (2006, the album this closing track comes from), the widely acclaimed Clinging to a Scheme (2010) and Running Out of Love (2016). 'Always a Relief' was written entirely by Duncanson, words and music, and closes Pet Grief. After a legal dispute with Labrador Records the band won back control of their catalogue and set up their own label, Just So!, and in 2026 they announced a return to live performance with a London headline show at KOKO on 3 November 2026, saying new music was in progress.

Real Estate formed in 2008 in Ridgewood, New Jersey, around childhood friends Martin Courtney (vocals/guitar), Alex Bleeker (bass) and Matt Mondanile (guitar), and later moved their base to Brooklyn. Their sound is gently chiming, Byrds-inspired jangle pop, suburban daydreams set to interlocking clean guitars. Days (2011), their Domino debut, is the record that made them, earning a rare 8.7 from Pitchfork and a Fader cover; it was followed by Atlas (2014), In Mind (2017), The Main Thing (2020) and Daniel (2024). Days was recorded over five months in a converted barn in New Paltz, New York, with producer Kevin McMahon, and 'All the Same' is its seven-minute closer. After Daniel (2024), the band toured an Atlas anniversary run in autumn 2025 with new guitarist James Richardson, who replaced Julian Lynch.

Portishead formed in Bristol, England, in 1991, naming themselves after Geoff Barrow's home town a few miles down the coast, with Beth Gibbons on vocals, Barrow on production and beats and Adrian Utley on guitar. Their sound is the definitive trip hop: crackling hip hop rhythms, spy-film guitar and Gibbons' aching torch-song vocals. Dummy (1994) won the 1995 Mercury Prize over Oasis and PJ Harvey and had sold more than three and a half million copies worldwide by 2008; Portishead (1997) and Third (2008) followed. Dummy's vintage texture was homemade: the band recorded their own music, cut it to vinyl, scuffed the records by walking across them on the studio floor, then sampled them back, and 'Wandering Star' is built on a sample of War's 'Magic Mountain'. The band have never split but have been dormant as a recording unit; their last full show was a 2022 Ukraine benefit in Bristol, they performed 'Roads' at the Together for Palestine benefit at Wembley Arena in September 2025, and Gibbons released her acclaimed debut solo album Lives Outgrown in 2024.

obli is the electronic project of Chris Null, a Los Angeles-based musician who spent seven years as the bassist of the rock band Dead Sara, touring widely with the group before parting ways to build his own music. Earlier, after settling in LA, he toured with Sonny Moore, who would later become Skrillex, as part of the three-piece Sonny and the Blood Monkeys. The sound is warm, melodic downtempo in the lineage of Bonobo and Four Tet, and the four-track Change EP (December 2020) was his debut EP after signing to ODESZA's Foreign Family Collective, with the title track's featured vocal drawing comparisons to Romy of The xx. He followed it with further singles, including 'hei' in 2022. Little public information is available about the featured vocalist, Omotola, beyond this credit.

Kelela Mizanekristos is a second-generation Ethiopian American singer, born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Her sound sits between the club and the bedroom: futuristic R&B and UK-bass textures carrying intimate, deliberately unhurried vocals. She arrived with the 2013 mixtape Cut 4 Me on Fade to Mind, then signed to Warp for Take Me Apart (2017), which was added to the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and Raven (2023), which scored 86 on Metacritic and was named Resident Advisor's album of the year. 'Happy Ending', produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii, was the second single from Raven and arrived in October 2022; Kelela has described the album as an affirmation of her perspective as a Black femme artist in dance music. After the live album In the Blue Light (2025), she released her third studio album, new avatar, in July 2026 on Warp.

Jacques Greene is Philippe Aubin-Dionne from Montreal, now based in Toronto, a producer whose emotive house and garage-inflected tracks helped define the early 2010s; he was part of Montreal's Turbo Crunk party collective and co-owns the Vase label, and his 2011 single 'Another Girl' was named one of Pitchfork's 200 best tracks of the decade so far. Koreless is Lewis Roberts, born in Bangor, Wales and long based in Glasgow, a producer of crystalline, patient electronic music (the Yugen EP, the 2021 album Agor) who went on to co-produce for FKA twigs on Magdalene, Caprisongs and Eusexua, the last of which won Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 2026 Grammys. 'Arrow' is the nine-minute closer of Greene's Concealer EP (2012) on Vase, a slow-blooming meeting of Greene's warmth and Koreless's glassy melodies. Greene released the Verses GT album with Nosaj Thing in 2025 and announced jg, his first solo album since 2019's Dawn Chorus, for release on 16 October 2026 on LuckyMe.