EKHO Sonic Chill #7

Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons met at the University of Manchester in 1989 and started DJing together in 1992. Over three decades they turned big beat into stadium-scale psychedelia: Exit Planet Dust (1995), Dig Your Own Hole (1997), Surrender (1999), No Geography (2019). 'Asleep From Day' is the Surrender track that shows their softer hand. A narcotic, genuinely tender ballad sung by Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, dropped into the middle of a record otherwise built for a field at 2am. In 2026 their 2015 single 'Go' climbed to No. 4 in the UK, eleven years after release and their first top-ten single in 22 years, after Taron Egerton approached the band to use it in the Netflix thriller Apex. Most recent album: For That Beautiful Feeling (2023).

Beacon. Thomas Mullarney III on voice and lyrics, Jacob Gossett on production. They met as students at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and started the project in 2011. Patient, low-lit electronic soul: R&B phrasing and UK garage rhythm dissolved into ambient synth-pop. Mostly released through Ghostly International across The Ways We Separate (2013), Escapements (2016) and Gravity Pairs (2018). 'Harm' is off Along the Lethe (2022), on Apparent Motion. Apple picked their song 'Show Me How' to score the MacBook Pro launch event in November 2020, which is a company that auditions everything picking Beacon.

Night Tapes. UK–Estonian trio based in London: Iiris Vesik from Estonia with Max Doohan and Sam Richards, who started playing together as housemates in South London in the late 2010s. Weightless, bass-heavy dream pop with a shoegaze smear on the edges, running from the 2019 EP Dream Forever in Glorious Stereo through Perfect Kindness (2023) to the debut album portals//polarities (September 2025). 'Space Force,' with vocalist Will Haff, is an early one, a single on the Nice Guys label in January 2020. They won a Music Moves Europe Award in January 2025, have had support from BBC Radio 1 and 6 Music, toured North America as headliners in autumn 2025, passed 34 million streams on 'drifting,' and in 2026 supported The Neighbourhood, including an arena date in Prague.

Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter, childhood friends from Greenwich in upstate New York, formed Phantogram in 2007 and first wrote and recorded in a remote barn called Harmonie Lodge. Their thing: hip-hop-weighted drum programming under hazy guitar and Barthel's cool, floating vocal. 'When I'm Small,' off the 2010 debut Eyelid Movies, is the song that broke them. It still defines the template they've followed across five albums, through 2024's Memory of a Day.

Yndling. Solo project of Norwegian singer, songwriter and producer Silje Espevik, based in Oslo. She started in 2020 as a bedroom producer posting demos to SoundCloud. Dream pop with the weight put back in: shoegaze guitar haze, trip-hop drum programming, a cool Scandinavian melancholy. She cites Beach House, Mazzy Star, Portishead and Massive Attack. 'Like Love is Real' opens her self-titled debut EP (January 2022), followed by the album Mood Booster (2024) and the two-part Time Time Time (I'm in the Palm of Your Hand) (November 2025). The Line of Best Fit ran a November 2025 feature crediting her with reinventing dream pop, timed with her first European headline tour.

Lali Puna started in 1998 as the solo project of Valerie Trebeljahr. Born in Busan, ten years of her childhood in Portugal, then Germany. It grew into a band when Markus Acher of The Notwist joined, followed by Christoph Brandner and Florian Zimmer. They're the definitive Morr Music sound: minimal, melancholy electronic pop with Trebeljahr's small, precise voice sitting just above the machines. 'Faking The Books' is the title track of the 2004 album, recorded between June and November 2003 in Weilheim and Munich with producer Mario Thaler and released on Morr Music in April 2004. Their most recent release as of 2026 is the Being Water EP (2019).

Kaskade is Ryan Raddon, the melodic-house architect behind It's You, It's Me (2003) and Automatic (2015). deadmau5 is Joel Zimmerman from Niagara Falls, the progressive-house obsessive behind 4x4=12. Skylar Grey is Holly Hafermann from Mazomanie, Wisconsin, who co-wrote 'Love the Way You Lie' and Zedd's Grammy-winning 'Clarity.' 'Beneath with Me' was the third collaboration between Kaskade and deadmau5, after 'Move for Me' and 'I Remember,' out 7 October 2016 on Warner Bros., with Grey co-writing and singing. The two producers later made the partnership formal as the duo Kx5, announced in 2022, and the self-titled album followed in March 2023.

Portishead formed in Bristol in August 1991 when Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons met on an Enterprise Allowance course, and guitarist Adrian Utley made it a trio. The definitive Bristol template: Barrow's crackling sampled loops and Utley's noir guitar under Gibbons's utterly exposed voice. Dummy (1994) won the 1995 Mercury Prize, then came Portishead (1997), Roseland NYC Live (1998) and the harsher Third (2008). 'Roads' is the one people reach for when they need a song to carry something too big for words, and decades on it's lost nothing. No album has followed Third, but in 2025 Barrow said the band never broke up, and they played together at a benefit concert that September.

Starling. Four-piece out of Los Angeles: Kasha Souter Willett on vocals and guitar, with Gitai Vinshtok, Grace Rolek and drummer Erik Sathrum Johnson. Willett started the project in 2023 and the full lineup settled in May 2024. They call the sound 'soft heaviness,' somewhere between grunge, singer-songwriter intimacy and shoegaze. 'Falling Down a Mystery Hillside' is on the debut EP 2324 (September 2024), followed by the EP Forgive Me, (June 2025) on Sunday Drive Records. That one's entirely self-made. Written over about a year, recorded by the band in sheds, apartments and garages, mixed by their own drummer, artwork shot by the band and their friends. Only the mastering got sent out.

Elysian Fields. Brooklyn duo, singer Jennifer Charles and guitarist Oren Bloedow, writing together since 1995. Mostly acoustic instruments, piano and guitar with occasional strings, all built around Charles's contralto. Critics call it noir rock. Key records: Bleed Your Cedar (1996), Queen of the Meadow (2000), The Afterlife (2009), where 'Climbing My Dark Hair' lives, and What the Thunder Said (2024). Here's the thing: their second album, made with Steve Albini, was shelved when their label, Radioactive, rejected it as too raw and uncommercial and wanted it redone. The band refused, and the record sat unreleased for seventeen years before they finally put it out themselves as Clinical Trial in 2014.

Nouvelle Vague. A Paris covers project founded in 2003 by Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux, built on one joke that turned out to be a great idea: post-punk and new-wave songs rearranged as bossa nova, sung by a rotating cast of mostly young female vocalists. On that first album the singers reportedly had never heard the songs before, so what you hear is a genuine first reading. Camille, Mélanie Pain, Phoebe Killdeer and Nadéah are among the singers who went on to solo careers. Camille Dalmais, who takes this one, is one of the most adventurous French pop artists of her generation. Le Fil (2005) is built over a single sustained vocal drone and went platinum in France, and in 2025 she and her partner Clément Ducol, with Jacques Audiard, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for 'El Mal' from Emilia Pérez. 'In a Manner of Speaking' was written by Winston Tong and first appeared on Tuxedomoon's Holy Wars in 1985.

Mannequin Pussy formed in Philadelphia in 2010 around school friends Marisa 'Missy' Dabice and Athanasios Paul. By 2026 it was Dabice on vocals and guitar, Kaleen Reading on drums, Colins 'Bear' Regisford on bass and Maxine Steen on guitar. The sound swings violently between hardcore ferocity and pure pop melody, and 'Darling,' the closing track of the Perfect EP (2021), is the soft end of that swing. After buying the masters of Romantic back from Tiny Engines, they launched their own imprint, Romantic Records, in August 2023, with a Romantic reissue as its first release. And in April 2026 they played NPR's Tiny Desk with a string quartet.

Emilíana Torrini. Born in 1977 in Kópavogur, Iceland, to an Italian father from Naples and an Icelandic mother. She sang in a choir from seven and went to opera school at fifteen. She was singing in an Icelandic restaurant when One Little Indian's Derek Birkett discovered her and flew her to London. Her records run from the electronic Love in the Time of Science (1999) to the hushed, almost entirely acoustic Fisherman's Woman (2005), then Me and Armini (2008), where 'Birds' sits, Tookah (2013) and Miss Flower (2024). She has a habit of turning up inside other people's landmark work. She sang 'Gollum's Song' over the end credits of The Two Towers after Björk, then pregnant, turned down the invitation, and she co-wrote and co-produced Kylie Minogue's 'Slow,' which earned her a Grammy nomination. In May 2026 her home town named her Town Artist of Kópavogur for 2026.

Zero 7. Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker, a London duo who studied sound engineering and came up as engineers at Mickie Most's RAK Studios. Their debut Simple Things (2001) is the record most people mean when they say British downtempo: Mercury-nominated, platinum, and where a lot of listeners first heard Sia. But this came first. Before they'd released a note of their own music, Radiohead trusted two unknown engineers with an OK Computer track, and the 1997 'Zero 7 Mix' is the first release that ever carried the name. Radiohead themselves formed in Abingdon in 1985 as five schoolfriends called On a Friday. Zero 7 released In the Half Light, their first full album since 2009, in 2024.

Hysterical Love Project. Brooklyn Mellar and Ike Zwanikken, a New Zealand pairing, with Zwanikken now based in Melbourne. Guitar-led downtempo: shoegaze textures, trip-hop weight, dream-pop melody. 'Your Laugh As My Ringtone' is track 7 on Lashes, out 21 March 2023 on Motion Ward, with Zwanikken and Mellar writing and producing everything. They're a radio-DJ favourite rather than a chart act, and for their Low End Theorists mix they described it as an ode to guitars and to unabashed simple beauty.

Jadu Heart. Diva Jeffrey and Alex Headford, an English duo who formed in London in 2016 and later moved to Bristol. Woozy psych-pop sliding between dream-pop, alt-R&B and hazy electronics. They met at BIMM, and the band exists because of a class assignment: students were told to depict a cycle audibly, and what they turned in became their first EP, Wanderflower. For their first few years they performed and did press entirely in masks, as the characters Dina and Faro, and only unmasked around Hyper Romance (2020), which is where 'Metal Violets' comes from. The song's stuck. It was still in the setlist at the 100 Club in London in December 2025, five years on.

BRONCHO formed in Norman, Oklahoma in 2010 as a Ryan Lindsey project and grew into one of the best fuzz-pop bands in America. Deadpan hooks, buried vocals, guitars permanently slightly out of focus. It's Lindsey on guitar and vocals, Brennan Smiley on guitar, Penny Pitchlynn on bass and Nathan Price on drums. 'Funny' is track 2 on Natural Pleasure (April 2025). Their 2014 single 'Class Historian' has had an absurd second life: a Fabletics campaign, a Cartoon Network campaign, the Vacation soundtrack, Santa Clarita Diet, the very first episode of Reservation Dogs, and a trailer for the game Ananta.

Vivienne Eastwood is not the fashion designer and not a typo. It's a shoegaze project that began in 2012, when Jordan John Parker and bandmate Jenny started playing music together in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The band last performed together in 2018, and Parker has carried the name on since. TAKE CARE (April 2025), with 'Ancient Signs' at track 7, was written and recorded by Parker alone. Parker grew up in Duluth, Minnesota. Before Parker was born, Parker's father played in a glam-rock band called Android with Phil Solem, who went on to form The Rembrandts, and Solem taught the young Parker 'Smoke on the Water.' Parker's favourite drum machines include a Korg KR-55 and a Casio CT210, the latter being the machine heard on Beach House's 'Wild.' The latest release is the album blurring (October 2025).

oOoOO. Solo project of Christopher Dexter Greenspan, founded in San Francisco in 2008 and often credited, alongside Salem and White Ring, as a pioneer of witch house: pitch-dragged vocals, screwed-down tempos, cathedral reverb and pop melodies under tape hiss. 'Springs' is track 2 on the Tri Angle EP Our Loving Is Hurting Us (2012). Butterclock, the featured vocalist, was based in Berlin at the time. Greenspan moved from San Francisco to Berlin in 2014, put out Without Your Love (2013) and Faminine Mystique (2018, with Islamiq Grrrls), and the two later released the album Good Songs for Bad People (2020) as Drab City.

Vök. Icelandic dream pop out of Reykjavík, formed in January 2013 by singer Margrét Rán Magnúsdóttir and saxophonist Andri Enoksson. They won Iceland's national band competition Músíktilraunir that March, within two months of existing. How about that? The sound is cool-blue electronic dream pop: breathy vocals, saxophone used as atmosphere rather than solo, a trip-hop undertow. 'Waterfall' opens the Circles EP (2015), which the duo produced themselves and which Biggi Veira of GusGus mixed and mastered. Margrét Rán has since become a member of GusGus, has scored documentaries including A Song Called Hate (2020) and The Day Iceland Stood Still (2024), and has won multiple Icelandic Music Awards. The band's most recent album is Vök (2022).

Hammock. Nashville duo, Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson, two guitarists who met in the alt-rock band Common Children and have been making ambient post-rock together since 2003. The sound is cathedral-scale: guitars processed past recognition, string arrangements, wordless choirs, very long timescales. 'The Backward Step' is off Chasing After Shadows...Living with the Ghosts (2010), the album where they first brought orchestral arrangements into the drone. They wrote roughly fifty candidate tracks and kept only what fit. That same year Byrd's house was nearly destroyed in the Tennessee floods, and that experience shaped the Longest Year EP (December 2010). They've put out records steadily since, including Love in the Void (2023), From the Void (2024) and Nevertheless (2025), though they only rarely play live.

Bowery Electric were a New York duo, Lawrence Chandler and Martha Schwendener, formed in late 1993, first show in January 1994. They started as Kranky-style shoegaze and drone and steadily mutated into something else entirely: samplers, loops and deep dub bass under the guitars, landing on a trip-hop-inflected downtempo nobody else was quite making. The records are Bowery Electric (1995), Beat (1996, the landmark), the Vertigo remix album (1997) and Lushlife (2000), where 'Floating World' lives. In 2016 Pitchfork ranked that 1995 debut No. 36 on its list of the greatest shoegaze albums of all time, and Beat got a 20th-anniversary vinyl reissue on Kranky the same year, a record that essentially predicted a whole later lineage of beat-driven shoegaze. Lushlife was their last release as Bowery Electric.

ABUNAI is Evan Gitterman, an Oakland-based multi-instrumentalist and producer. He started on piano, then saxophone, then settled on bass guitar, which anchors much of what he makes, after five teenage years playing weekends in a jazz-funk band. Psychedelic electronic soul, with a strong oceanic streak he traces to the California coast and his family's Hawaiian roots. 'mph outro' is track 3 on Chrysalis, his second album (Tartelet Records, May 2022), a 1:54 piece with Kevin Farzad of Sure Sure on drums and percussion. Gitterman produced and mixed the record himself. Gilles Peterson and Don Letts were early supporters, and his grandfather, a Hawaii-based sailor and pilot, told him the album was ideal music for sailing the ocean at sunset.

Juana Molina. Argentine singer, guitarist and producer from Buenos Aires, born in 1961 into an artistic family. Her father was the tango singer Horacio Molina, and she was exiled with the family to Paris in 1976. Her music's built live from loops: guitar, voice and analogue synth stacked into hypnotic, funny, faintly haunted folktronica. 'Cálculos y oráculos' is track 6 on Halo (2017). Before any of this she was Argentina's most popular television comedian, with the sketch show Juana y sus hermanas, and in 1994 she quit it at the absolute peak to go make records. She later said she'd pictured herself watching MTV as a decrepit old woman, thinking 'I could have done that.' David Byrne found her album Segundo and took her on tour in the States as his opening act. In November 2025 she put out DOGA, her first album of new compositions in eight years.

Keep Shelly in Athens. Greek dream pop out of Kypseli, a dense old neighbourhood of Athens that the band's name puns on, formed in 2010 around an anonymous producer who goes only by the letters RΠЯ. The singer's chair has rotated: Sarah P. (2010–2014), then Myrtha (2014–2017), then Jessica Bell. Warm, Balearic-tinged downtempo with soaring vocals. 'Recollection' is a single from the debut album At Home (Cascine, 2013). They went from blog-hype 12-inch to the Coachella bill in 2012, barely two years after forming. Later albums include Now I'm Ready (2015), Philokalia (2017), Among Wolves (2023) and V.

Kiasmos. Faroese-Icelandic duo: Ólafur Arnalds, the Icelandic composer known for strings-and-piano minimalism, and Janus Rasmussen of the Faroese bands Bloodgroup and Byrta. They met when Arnalds was working as a sound engineer for Rasmussen's band Bloodgroup. Melodic minimal techno with classical bones. 'Thrown' first appeared in 2012 on a split 12-inch with Rival Consoles on Erased Tapes, then on the 2014 self-titled debut album. It started as a part-time side project between two friends from neighbouring islands and turned into a genuinely world-scale live act. Their second album, II, followed on Erased Tapes in 2024.