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). Zegon 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 put together. It's rooted in Brazilian funk, with an astonishing guest list: Kanye West, David Byrne, Tom Waits, M.I.A., George Clinton, Karen O, Method Man and more. The stated mission was 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, 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. London-based dream-pop trio: Estonian singer Iiris Vesik with British producers Max Doohan and Sam Richards. They started the band as evening jam sessions while sharing a house in South London in the late 2010s. 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) their debut album portals//polarities came out on Nettwerk in September 2025, and 'television' was 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. And get this: Vesik had earlier placed fourth in Estonia's Eurovision selection Eesti Laul, in 2010, with a song she wrote at 18.

Radiohead. 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' is off Amnesiac (2001), drawn from the same 1999-2000 sessions that produced Kid A. It's the most guitar-driven, Smiths-like song on a record otherwise full of electronics and jazz colors, and Johnny Marr himself praised its guitar work for capturing his old band's melodic feel. Famously, this deceptively simple song took them 373 days to finish, and the Michel Gondry video was shot in a single continuous take. The single hit 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 built to keep bots and touts out. In 2026 they 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. He 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. 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 was later 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. Bristol shoegaze and dream pop, formed in 2007 around singer Alison Garner, bassist Michael Savage and drummer Guy Rhys-Davies, with guitarist Will Slater. Their self-titled 2009 debut came out with almost no promotion on their own Laser Ghost label, and it still 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. The newest record adds electro and disco pulses under the guitar haze.

Hird was the alias of Christoffer Berg, a keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist from Gothenburg, Sweden. He 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. 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. She 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's also produced house and techno under the Mountain Range alias, and Nagano put out her debut solo album, For You, as Yukimi in 2025.

Beach House. Baltimore dream pop, a duo: 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. Slow-burning, organ-and-guitar reverie. '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, recorded over eleven months starting in their own Baltimore studio, and 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). 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. 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. It debuted at number 1 in the UK, topped charts in Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, and brought in Cocteau Twins singer Elizabeth Fraser on 'Teardrop', 'Group Four' and 'Black Milk', her wordless, otherworldly voice floating over a slow, sinister groove. For its 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 put out '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, friends since they were six, with Christian Savill, Nick Chaplin and Simon Scott completing the classic line-up. Textbook shoegaze: reverb-soaked guitars and blended boy-girl vocals. 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 Pitchfork has since ranked it the second-greatest shoegaze album of all time, 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. As the dance act Sub Sub they first hit the UK top three in 1993, before a 1996 studio fire wiped out their tapes and gear and, in effect, gave them the reset that produced Doves. Widescreen, melancholic northern rock with the rhythmic pull of their club past. '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, with 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, out of Grangemouth, Scotland. 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're the founding text of dream pop. 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 with major-label distribution in the US, through Capitol. It 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. Milan duo, DJ/producer Stefano Ghittoni and guitarist Cesare Malfatti, formed in 1998 and 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. Together they 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, 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 her own Mercury nomination for Quixotic (2003) and sang 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. Daughter of a Pakistani father and an English mother of Norwegian descent. 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' is off Fast Food (2015), her second album with producer Ben Hillier, which gave her her first UK chart entry. The follow-up, Holiday Destination (2017), earned a 2018 Mercury Prize nomination. She's 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's 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, and dropped the name partly over potential trouble with the vacuum-cleaner maker. The debut, A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular, is lush, sample-built, string-swept trip-hop. Its single '2Wicky' landed in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1996 film Stealing Beauty, and that's 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 be the first Belgian act to headline the Rock Werchter festival (2001), wrote the opening-ceremony music for Euro 2000, had 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. She was playing, he was running sound, and they started writing almost right away. Jesse Perlman (guitar) and Edward James (keys) complete the band. Hushed, jazz-tinged bedroom pop that moves between English and Spanish. Superclean Vol. I (2017) grew out of recordings first meant 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 got 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, mixing live jazz players with sampling, strings and downtempo electronics. Ma Fleur (2007), an album about loss and love, was later 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, they 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. 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, after 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 it 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's a Sunday Times bestselling author: her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen (2013) was followed by more books including Naked at the Albert Hall and My Rock 'n' Roll Friend. Everything but the Girl came back in 2023 with Fuse, their first album in 24 years.

Night Swimming. Five-piece dream pop out of Bath and Bristol, in the west of England: singer Meg Jones, guitarists Sam Allen and Jesse Roache, bassist Josh Nottle and drummer Torin Moore. 'Let That Be Enough' is off their debut EP, No Place To Land, out on Friday, September 27th, 2024, with Peter Miles producing. Meg says it's about 'moving on from past experiences and learning to trust yourself and accepting the choices you've made.' BBC 6 Music got behind them, and they went back to Peter Miles for their second EP, Melting, Sometimes Bleeding, out on Venn Records in May 2026. Five summer days, live to tape in Devon, and Simon Scott of Slowdive mastered it.

Warpaint. 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. 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. The band co-produced it with Flood, who also mixed most of it, with two tracks mixed by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. It 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', and 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 was on the 6 Kiss mixtape that December, and the beat became Volpe's best-known work. Imogen Heap liked what he'd done with her voice and was happy for it to come out as long as she was credited. The instrumental was finally released officially on 24 April 2020 on the compilation Instrumental Relics, and it was 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 next year. 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', which means 'hope' in Persian, is sung by LouLou Ghelichkhani, one of their longest-running collaborators. The duo later got 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. Producer, DJ and multi-instrumentalist out of Washington, DC, and he co-owns the vinyl-focused label Redefinition Records. He first surfaced as half of the duo Y Society with rapper Insight. Warm, sample-driven boom bap: crunchy drums, chopped soul and jazz loops, horn lines layered into small narratives. 'Tea Thyme' is off How It Should Sound Volume 1 & 2, the collection of his earlier beats that Redefinition put out 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. Later releases include Away Back In (2023) with Raw Poetic and Peace of Action (2024).

Nouvelle Vague. Founded in Paris in 2003 by producers Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux with a single idea: take post-punk and new wave songs and redo them as hushed bossa nova, sung by a cast of mostly French female vocalists. The name is a triple pun. It means 'new wave' in French, it nods to the French New Wave cinema movement, and it translates 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, turns into a whispered, sun-dazed lullaby in the hands of singer Camille. She 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. Six-piece soul-electronic collective out of Auckland, New Zealand, formed in 2015. A group of already-established Auckland musicians (from Kids of 88, Goodnight Nurse, Cool Rainbows and others) took a spontaneous holiday writing songs at a beach house in Muriwai, and the chemistry was too good to waste. Sun-warmed indie soul: laid-back grooves, glossy guitar lines, airy group vocals. Key records are the self-titled debut (2016), Twister (2019), Sunsetter (2021, the album 'Be With You' is off), Leisurevision (2023) and Welcome to the Mood (September 2025), all via Nettwerk. What started as a side project gave them an Australian Gold and NZ Platinum single in 'Slipping Away' (2020), and keyboardist/producer Josh Fountain has also produced for pop artist BENEE. 'Diamonds' off Welcome to the Mood reached number 28 on the NZ Hot Singles chart in 2025.

Prefab Sprout, out of the village of Witton Gilbert in County Durham, north-east England. Songwriter Paddy McAloon, his brother Martin on bass and singer Wendy Smith. McAloon just made up the name because he liked how the two words sounded together. 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. Then From Langley Park to Memphis (1988) and Jordan: The Comeback (1990). Dolby became their producer after he praised 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., out of Lund, Sweden. Named after a local petrol station that had been turned into a radio repair shop. Led by Johan Duncanson and Martin Larsson (now Carlberg), with Daniel Tjäder on keyboards. Hushed, hazy dream pop: soft-focus guitars, drum-machine pulse, melodies that feel like memories. That's why Sofia Coppola used three of their songs in Marie Antoinette (2006). Key records are Lesser Matters (2003), Pet Grief (2006, where 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 it 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!. 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. Gently chiming, Byrds-inspired jangle pop, suburban daydreams over interlocking clean guitars. Days (2011), their Domino debut, is the record that made them: a rare 8.7 from Pitchfork and a Fader cover. Then came 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, and named after Geoff Barrow's home town a few miles down the coast. Beth Gibbons on vocals, Barrow on production and beats, Adrian Utley on guitar. 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'. They've never split, but they've 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 put out 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 in the rock band Dead Sara, touring widely with them before parting ways to build his own music. Before that, after settling in LA, he toured with Sonny Moore, who'd later become Skrillex, in the three-piece Sonny and the Blood Monkeys. Warm, melodic downtempo in the lineage of Bonobo and Four Tet. The four-track Change EP (December 2020) was his debut EP after signing to ODESZA's Foreign Family Collective, and the title track's featured vocal drew comparisons to Romy of The xx. Further singles followed, including 'hei' in 2022. Little public information is out there about the featured vocalist, Omotola, beyond this credit.

Kelela Mizanekristos. 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 made 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, out in October 2022. Kelela has called the album an affirmation of her perspective as a Black femme artist in dance music. After the live album In the Blue Light (2025), her third studio album, new avatar, came out 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, 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), he went on to co-produce for FKA twigs on Magdalene, Caprisongs and Eusexua. That last one 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 put out the Verses GT album with Nosaj Thing in 2025 and announced jg, his first solo album since 2019's Dawn Chorus, for 16 October 2026 on LuckyMe.