EKHO Sonic Chill #8

Wax Tailor is Jean-Christophe Le Saoût, a producer from Vernon in Normandy who came up through French radio and the nineties rap group La Formule before launching the alias in 2001. Cinematic trip-hop built from vintage vocal samples, film dialogue and live strings. Turntablism with a screenwriter's ear. Tales of the Forgotten Melodies (2005) is the calling card, followed by Hope & Sorrow, In the Mood for Life, Dusty Rainbow from the Dark, By Any Beats Necessary, The Shadow of Their Suns and Fishing for Accidents (2023). He founded his own label, Lab'Oratoire, in 1998, and in 2025 toured the United States and Canada to mark the 20th anniversary of Tales of the Forgotten Melodies.

Night Tapes. UK-Estonian trio, Iiris Vesik, Max Doohan and Sam Richards, who started playing together as housemates in South London in the late 2010s. Widescreen dream pop: soft-focus synths, tape hiss and Vesik's weightless vocal somewhere between shoegaze and downtempo electronica. 'Dream' is off the EP Dream Forever in Glorious Stereo (2019), their first statement, followed by the EPs Download Spirit (2020), Perfect Kindness (2023) and assisted memories (2024). And get this: they spent six years putting out EPs before finally releasing a debut album. portals//polarities arrived on 26 September 2025, and the patience shows in every bar of it.

Sneaker Pimps formed in Hartlepool, County Durham in 1994 around Liam Howe and Chris Corner, with Kelli Ali (then Kelli Dayton) singing lead on the 1996 debut Becoming X. Trip-hop with a pop songwriter's spine: sultry, string-laced, immaculately arranged, and genuinely influential on what British electronic music sounded like for the next decade. Becoming X is still the landmark, selling over a million copies. Splinter (1999) and Bloodsport (2002) followed with Corner on the microphone, and the reunited band came back with Squaring the Circle in 2021. What's remarkable is how far the alumni went. Corner built the long-running IAMX project, and Howe kept producing. The band turned out to be a launchpad as much as a group.

Common Saints is the psychedelic-soul project of Charlie J Perry, a songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist born in London, raised in Oxfordshire and working from a studio in South London. Perry trained on classical piano from age six before moving into production, and spent more than a decade writing and producing for others, with credits alongside BTS, Jorja Smith, Olivia Dean, Lola Young and Maverick Sabre, before stepping out under his own name. The Starchild EP came out in October 2021, the debut album Cinema 3000 in November 2024, the Equinox EP in June 2025 and the Age of Illusions EP in June 2026.

Nohidea. A masked, Los Angeles-based producer who came up through the online lo-fi hip-hop community and has built a big catalogue of ambient-leaning, sample-rich instrumental hip-hop, including Esuna (2017), thirteen songs released on consecutive days as a tribute to Nujabes. Textural and unhurried, with sound design doing as much work as the beat. Departures (August 2018) came out on the Los Angeles label Alpha Pup Records, and 'entheogen' on it is a collaboration with the Portland producer Yung Bae. He's also a thoughtful writer on the music: in May 2022 Atwood Magazine published his essay on how Nujabes spawned an entire generation of musicians.

Tokyo Tea Room. Dream pop out of Kent, built around vocalist Beth and songwriter, guitarist and producer Dan Elliott. Warm melodic bass, hypnotic guitar and dreamy synths. One writer described it as a warm summer breeze that reminds you of a fortnight's holiday. 'There's A Place' is from their debut album No Rush (24 January 2025, Nice Guys). Their second album, Feel Forever, followed on Nice Guys on 18 September 2026, alongside 31 headline dates across the UK, US and Europe.

Jadu Heart. Diva Jeffrey and Alex Headford, a duo who met at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute in London and have been based in Bristol since 2019, working out of their own basement studio. They move freely between dream pop, shoegaze, indie rock and folktronica. Lush, warm and structurally restless, never quite settling where you expect. The run goes Wanderflower (2016), Melt Away (2019), Hyper Romance (2020), Derealised (2023) and POST HEAVEN (2025), where 'Littleboy' sits. The band started as a college assignment to depict a cycle audibly, and in their early years they performed and did press entirely in masks, as the mythical characters Dina and Faro, before unmasking around the Hyper Romance release.

AtticOmatic. Five-piece from Brighton who formed in a house-share and have been playing together for six or seven years, far longer than their short discography suggests. Genre-hopping alt-rock with nineties DIY grit: twin vocals from Kamran Kaur and Lorcan Forder, ambient soul and experimental pop folded into indie rock, drawing comparisons to The Breeders, Palehound and Jay Som. 'Lewin' is a single from Between Two, their second EP, out in March 2026. Forder describes their writing philosophy as refusing to settle in advance: 'We don't write a song to fit a way of doing it. We write to see where it can go.' That's exactly what the record sounds like.

The Clientele. London band built around Alasdair MacLean on vocals and guitar, James Hornsey on bass and Mark Keen on drums, formed in 1991 after MacLean and Hornsey met growing up in Hampshire. Hushed, reverb-soaked English guitar pop: Velvet Underground languor crossed with a very English melancholy, the kind of record that sounds like dusk. 'Reflections After Jane' is off Suburban Light (2000), a compilation of early singles that became their breakthrough and is still the entry point. MacLean and Hornsey's friendship started at school when MacLean spotted the word 'Felt' written on Hornsey's pencil case. That's the Lawrence-led cult band, and that shared reference started the whole thing. After an indefinite hiatus announced in 2011 they came back in 2014, and put out their seventh album, I Am Not There Anymore, in 2023.

she's green. Five-piece out of Minneapolis: Zofia Smith on vocals, Liam Armstrong and Raines Lucas on guitars, Teddy Nordvold on bass and Kevin Seebeck on drums. They formed in 2022 and signed to Photo Finish Records. Shoegaze blurring into dream pop: guitars stacked into weather, vocals floating at the top of the mix rather than fighting it. The Wisteria EP (2023) put them on the map, and 'paper thin' arrived in April 2026 as the lead single from the swallowtail EP, released that July. Smith says the song is about the confusion between lust and love at the end of a relationship, and the arrangement leans into that instability on purpose. It's built to feel unsteady, which is a hard thing to do well. In 2026 they toured North America and played Reading and Leeds. Styled lowercase, name and title both.

Toro y Moi is Chaz Bear, born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1986 and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He came up as one of chillwave's defining figures with Causers of This (2010) and has refused to stand still since: live-band psychedelia on Underneath the Pine, nineties R&B on Anything in Return, guitar rock on What For?, and the woozy, immaculate electronic soul of Boo Boo (2017), which 'Labyrinth' closes out. He wrote Boo Boo while working through an identity crisis brought on by rising fame, pulling from an unusually wide spread of influences: Travis Scott, Daft Punk, Frank Ocean, Oneohtrix Point Never and the Italian ambient composer Gigi Masin. He's also a working visual artist who founded Company Studio in 2016 and designs most of his own artwork. He released Hole Erth in 2024.

Mogwai formed in Glasgow in 1995 and have spent their career proving instrumental rock can carry as much narrative weight as any lyric. Stuart Braithwaite on guitar, Dominic Aitchison on bass, Martin Bulloch on drums and Barry Burns on keys, guitar and flute. Their trademark is dynamics: whispered, glacial passages that detonate into some of the loudest guitar music ever committed to tape, across Mogwai Young Team (1997), Come On Die Young (1999) and Happy Songs for Happy People (2003). 'Hunted by a Freak' opens that album, carried by Barry Burns' vocoder-treated vocal. More than 25 years in, they took As the Love Continues to No. 1 on the UK albums chart, a first for the band. And they run their own label, Rock Action Records, which turned 30 in 2026.

Night Swimming. Five-piece who met at university in Bath and work out of the Bristol area: Meg Jones on vocals with Sam Allen, Jesse Roache, Josh Nottle and Torin Moore. Dream pop with real architecture to it: arpeggiated, reverb-drenched guitars and cinematic scale, with a lineage running from Cocteau Twins, The Cure and Slowdive through Warpaint, Daughter and Wolf Alice. 'Evergreen' was their debut single, in April 2024, and it's on the No Place To Land EP. There's a notable pedigree behind the desk. Producer Peter Miles has worked with them since that first single, and their 2026 EP, Melting, Sometimes Bleeding, was mastered by Simon Scott of Slowdive, which is about as direct a blessing as a dream-pop band can get. They signed to Venn Records in November 2025.

Anders Trentemøller. Danish producer and one-man studio orchestra, born in Vordingborg in 1972 and based in Copenhagen. He made his name with 2006's The Last Resort, a landmark of moody melodic electronica, then steadily pivoted toward live instrumentation, shoegaze and darkwave across Into the Great Wide Yonder, Lost, Fixion, Obverse and Dreamweaver. He's a genuinely elite remixer. His rework of Franz Ferdinand's 'No You Girls' earned a Grammy nomination, and he wrote the main theme for AMC's Halt and Catch Fire, which is why a lot of people know his music without knowing his name. Modeselektor, who take the remix here, are Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary, a Berlin duo who met in 1992 in the free-party rave scene just after the Wall came down. They founded Monkeytown Records in 2009 and form two-thirds of Moderat alongside Apparat.

Röyksopp. Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland, childhood friends from Tromsø in the Norwegian Arctic who came up through the late-nineties Bergen Wave. Their 2001 debut Melody A.M. is one of the definitive downtempo records: warm, melodic, faintly melancholy electronica that went to No. 1 in Norway and No. 9 in the UK, sold three-quarters of a million copies, and landed in The Guardian's 1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die. 'In Space' is that album at its most weightless. Here's the twist: in 2014 they announced The Inevitable End would be their final album, then came roaring back with the sprawling Profound Mysteries trilogy in 2022, the ambient Nebulous Nights in 2024 and True Electric in 2025. Norway's Verdens Gang named Melody A.M. the best Norwegian album of the 2000s.

UNKLE. The long-running London project of James Lavelle, who founded the hugely influential Mo'Wax label in 1992 at eighteen and put out around 200 records in its first four or five years, including the debut albums that broke DJ Shadow and Dr. Octagon. UNKLE's 1998 debut Psyence Fiction, made with DJ Shadow, is a cornerstone of trip-hop, with Thom Yorke, Richard Ashcroft and Mike D among the guests. Across Never, Never, Land, War Stories, Where Did the Night Fall and The Road, Lavelle has kept it a rotating cast rather than a fixed band. The Rōnin series is a beautiful sideways move: Lavelle and producer Miink rebuilding the catalogue into long-form mixtapes, with new material and contributions from Michael Kiwanuka, Mark Lanegan and Keaton Henson.

The National. Five men from Cincinnati, Ohio who formed the band in Brooklyn in 1999. Two sets of brothers, twins Aaron and Bryce Dessner on guitars and keys and Scott and Bryan Devendorf on bass and drums, plus Matt Berninger's baritone out front. They built one of the great slow-burn careers in American rock through Alligator (2005), Boxer (2007) and High Violet (2010), and won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album for Sleep Well Beast. I Am Easy to Find (4AD, 2019) is their most generous record. Berninger repeatedly hands the microphone to women: Lisa Hannigan, Sharon Van Etten, Mina Tindle, Gail Ann Dorsey, Kate Stables and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, with 'Light Years' closing the standard album. It was made alongside a Mike Mills short film starring Alicia Vikander. Their tenth album, Laugh Track, followed in 2023.

DJ Cam is Laurent Daumail. Parisian producer, one of the founding figures of French trip-hop and abstract hip-hop, coming up in the mid-nineties alongside the wider French Touch wave that produced Daft Punk, Air and Cassius. Underground Vibes (1995), where this one lives, and The Beat Assassinated (1998) are his most admired records. Dusty, jazz-soaked, cinematic instrumental hip-hop that helped define what downtempo sounded like in France. He's been prolific and restless ever since, moving through jazz with the DJ Cam Quartet, then drum and bass and house, without ever fully leaving the boom-bap behind, and he was invited to curate an entry in the prestigious DJ-Kicks mix series. He runs his own label, Inflamable.

Gorillaz. The virtual band dreamed up in 1998 by Blur's Damon Albarn and comic artist Jamie Hewlett. They met in 1990 when Hewlett interviewed Blur for a magazine, and ended up sharing a London flat in 1997. The concept came out of watching too much MTV and wanting to make a comment on it: four cartoon characters fronting music made by a genuinely staggering rotating cast of collaborators. 'Tomorrow Comes Today' is from the very beginning, off the 2001 self-titled debut that went triple platinum in the UK. Demon Days went six times platinum. They're arguably the most successful art project in pop history, and their ninth album, The Mountain, came out in February 2026, debuted at No. 1 in the UK, and was followed by a world tour.

Autolux. Trio out of Los Angeles, formed in 2001: drummer-vocalist Carla Azar, guitarist-vocalist Greg Edwards (also of Failure) and bassist-vocalist Eugene Goreshter. Shoegaze guitar-blur welded to a hard, elastic rhythmic sense. Pitchfork later put their debut Future Perfect at No. 44 on its list of the greatest shoegaze albums ever made. Future Perfect (October 2004) was produced by T Bone Burnett for his DMZ label, then came Transit Transit (2010) and Pussy's Dead (2016). Here's the thing: Carla Azar's parallel life is as one of the most in-demand drummers alive. She played on Jack White's Blunderbuss, Lazaretto and Boarding House Reach and toured in his band, has guested for PJ Harvey, John Frusciante, The Who and boygenius, and acted in the 2014 Michael Fassbender film Frank. 'Here Comes Everybody' is also the best-known expansion of HCE in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, though the band hasn't been documented connecting the title to it.

mercury is the band of Maddie Kerr. She started it in her senior year at Franklin High School in Franklin, Tennessee, outside Nashville, and signed to Nashville's Big Loud Rock, which put out her debut single 'I Don't Know You Like I Used To' in 2022. The sound is enormous and emotionally direct, with Radiohead and Deftones among her influences. Kerr calls it very big, emotional, cinematic, heavy. 'Special' is one of three songs on Together We Are One, You and I (7 June 2024), produced by Alex Farrar, whose credits include Wednesday, Snail Mail and Indigo De Souza. Kerr finished writing it the night before recording it with him in Asheville. Live, she gets the wall of sound by standing right in front of a giant Marshall stack and playing loud enough to let it get a little out of control. Concord Music Publishing signed her as a songwriter in June 2024, and in October 2025 she said a debut LP was in the works.

José González. Born in Gothenburg in 1978 to Argentine parents who fled after the 1976 military coup, reaching Sweden via asylum granted through the Swedish consulate in Rio de Janeiro. His music is about as distilled as it gets: nylon-string classical guitar, fingerpicked with percussive precision, and a soft, close, unhurried vocal. Veneer (October 2003) made his name, and 'Broken Arrows' closes it. In Our Nature, Vestiges & Claws, Local Valley and the band Junip followed. He took a master's in molecular biology at the University of Gothenburg and was some way into a biochemistry PhD before walking away to play guitar full time. And since 2017 he's pledged through Giving What We Can to give away at least ten per cent of his income every year. His fifth album, Against the Dying of the Light, came out in March 2026.

Band of Horses. Started in Seattle in 2004, when Ben Bridwell began writing again after his previous group Carissa's Wierd wound down. The line-up as of 2026: Bridwell on vocals and guitar, Creighton Barrett on drums, Matt Gentling on bass, Brett Nash on guitar and Joel Graves on keys. Big-sky American indie rock, cavernous reverb, Bridwell's high, cracking tenor riding over the top. Intimate and arena-sized in the same breath. 'The First Song' opens Everything All The Time, which came out in March 2006 on Sub Pop with Phil Ek producing. Bridwell went in wanting an ELO record. His words: 'I thought before recording that I really wanted an ELO-sounding record, with strings and keyboards and synths.' He only swerved toward the raw, roomy approach as the sessions got close, and that's how that famous open-air sound happened. In 2026 they marked the album's 20th anniversary with a Sub Pop reissue and a tour playing it in full.

Funki Porcini is James Braddell, born in London in 1962, and one of the foundational voices of Ninja Tune's downtempo era. He spent a decade in Italy writing music for film and television before coming home and signing to Ninja Tune in 1994, and you can hear that cinematic training in everything he does. Long, patient, widescreen tracks built from dusty breaks, deep bass and film-score atmosphere. Hed Phone Sex (1995) is the defining record, and 'Long Road' is on it. How it was built is the good part. Braddell filled his sampler with sounds hoovered up from charity-shop records and promotional flexi-discs, pitch-shifted his own voice, spent weeks getting single drum loops right, and went out into the field to record real-world sound, including chunks of ice thrown across a frozen lake. He put out four albums between 2021 and 2025, most recently Modern Hymns for Modern Things. He's also a filmmaker.

Tummyache is Soren Bryce, an American songwriter and producer originally from Amarillo, Texas, who's worked across DIY scenes in the US and the UK. It started in 2018, and Bandcamp puts it neatly: a project that blurs the line between band and personal confession. Grunge-weighted alternative rock that swings from whisper to full detonation. In November 2024 Bryce released The Theory of Relatability, a whole eleven-track album assembled from raw voice notes, home demos, studio bounces and garage recordings dating back to 2018. A working diary published as a record, and that's a rare thing for an artist to be that open about. 'Feeding Tube' came out in June 2026, 'Porcelain Dish' followed on 4 September 2026, and a fourth album, Repeat in Reverse, was announced for October 2026.

Sigur Rós. Formed in Reykjavík in January 1994 around Jón Þór 'Jónsi' Birgisson on vocals and guitar, Georg Hólm on bass and Ágúst Ævar Gunnarsson on drums, with keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson joining in 1998. The sound is built on Jónsi's cello-bowed guitar and a falsetto that floats above chamber orchestration. On Ágætis byrjun that meant a double string octet among other classical elements. Much of it is sung in Vonlenska, or Hopelandic, the band's own wordless vocal language, chosen for how syllables feel rather than what they mean. Ágætis byrjun (June 1999) is the landmark: eighth on Pitchfork's albums of the 2000s and winner of the first Shortlist Music Prize. The video for 'Svefn-g-englar' was made with Perlan, an Icelandic theatre company of performers with Down syndrome. A beautiful, singular piece of film. Kjartan Sveinsson, who left around 2013, rejoined in 2022, and in 2023 the band released Átta and toured with a 41-piece orchestra. The title is an Icelandic pun folding 'sleepwalkers' into 'sleep angels', often rendered as 'Sleepwalking Angels'.