escho

A Good Year is the collaborative project of producer and former Liss drummer Tobias Laust Hansen and filmmaker-turned-musician Albert R. Hildebrand. Play. moves between acoustic instrumentation, synthetic textures and loose-limbed rhythms, balancing baggy drums, bass-heavy electronics and understated guitar work with a reflective, road-trip atmosphere. Across the record, tender vocal performances and layered production give the songs a shifting sense of scale, from intimate sketches to expansive, anthem-like moments. Contributions from Horse Vision, Koilwood, Tiffi M, Quiet Light, Late Verlane, Alba Akvama, Suisse Air and MØ add further depth to its blurred mix of organic and electronic sounds.

One of the definitive albums of 2024, edited and remixed by close pals and admirers; Conrad Pack, ML Buch, Blood Orange, Valentina Magaletti, Lolina, Smerz, Slauson Malone, HVAD and more.

The judicious pick of editors render the downbeat charms and quietly reflective, penetrating lyrics of ‘Great Doubt’ into spaces faithful to, adjacent, and far removed from Astrid Sonne’s beloved originals. Variously teasing its baked in ingredients of chamber music, art-pop, and R&B from curious new perspectives, they range, for example, from the plonging industrial dub rework of ‘Boost’ by Conrad Pack, to a standout 12 minute expansion of ‘Light and Heavy’ along moonlit, Autechrian lines by an ever reliable HVAD, whereas avant R&B star Blood Orange emphasises the breezy soul of ‘Give My All’ is a bright, lustrous overhaul refreshed with tumescent art-pop harmonies, and ML Buch puckers ‘Overture’ to a sparkling whorl that highlights her collaborator’s instrumental tekkerz.

Valentina Magaletti (whose work rate, at this point, makes us wonder if she’s a tulpa) can be counted on for a dusted downbeat take on ‘Everything is Unreal’, and Lolina likewise reliably enhances the oddness of ‘Almost’ in her elusive way, whilst the likes of pop duo Smerz and Slauson Malone amplify Sonne’s infectiouus hooks with a dance-pop appeal.

“Great Doubt” is the third full length LP by Danish composer Astrid Sonne. Throughout her acclaimed discography, Astrid Sonne has been carefully crafting different moods through electronic and acoustic instrumental endeavours. On “Great Doubt” this skill is refined, now with the distinct addition of the composer's own vocal in front. The tone of each track is unmistakably Sonne’s, structured around contrasts through an impeccable sense of timing. Lyrics on the album are sparse, merely highlighting different scenes or emotional states of being, leaving the music to fill in the blanks. Yet they also form a pattern of ambiguity, consolidated through the album title, searching for answers through looking at how and what you are asking, questions for the world, questions of love. The viola, a trusted companion since Astrid Sonne’s youth, appears effortlessly throughout the album, fully integrated into the sonic universe; through a pizzicato driven arrangement in the poignant track “Almost” or along with booms and claps in mutated cinematic stabs during “Give my all”, paraphrasing Mariah Carey's 1997 ballad. Yet the string section also gives way to explorations of woodwinds, counterbalancing the bowed movements with digital brass and airy flutes. Finally, beats and detuned piano are fresh additions to the soundscape, cementing how Sonne’s practice is always evolving into new territories.

New from Escho - 'Pusher' OST composer Peter Schneidermann (aka Peter Peter) taps his mates Majke Voss and Ice Age's Elias Rønnenfelt for his proper Bleeder debut, covering Lydia Lunch's 'Boy/Girl' and Fifty Foot Hose's 'If Not This Time' in the process. Schneidermann is a familiar face on the Copenhagen scene, working closely with Nicolas Winding Refn on the 'Valhalla Rising' score as well as the scores for each of the 'Pusher' films. And he's been a member of the Escho family for years, so it was surely only a matter of time until he collaborated with Rønnenfelt. The band rush for the '90s on 'Marble Station', layering wall-of-sound guitars with deadpan vocals, while on 'Here Comes the Dead', they sound more like Black Country heroes Slade. The band's version of 'Boy/Girl' is stronger, led by rattling hi-hats and sleazy, Suicide-style guitars and they show off their range with their surprisingly tender version of 'If Not This Time'. It's all a bit knowing, sure, but it's Copenhagen, innit.

Following up last year's acclaimed 'Heavy Glory' and collabs with Dean Blunt and Yung Lean, Iceage's Elias Rønnenfelt maxes on Yves Tumor-indebted hyper-sexual '90s indie-isms, trading sniffs 'n sneers with Erika de Casier, Fine and The Congos. RIYL Happy Mondays, Primal Scream or Bar Italia.

Rønnenfelt's always been good at predicting tidal shifts. Even when he was a teen fronting hardcore punk heroes Iceage he repeatedly bucked expectations, choosing to tour with fringe noise operatives like Helm and evolve the band's sound into something more like Spiritualized, augmenting chugging Britpop references with a full gospel choir on 2021's 'Seek Shelter'. So when his solo debut arrived last year, its peculiarity was almost a given; why wouldn't it be a set of country-tinted folk-rock jammers backed up with covers of Spacemen 3 and Townes Van Zandt? 'Speak Daggers', though, is a different beast altogether. Made in his bedroom between tours, it's a thicker, more confidently obstinate album than its predecessor that plays more like a continuation or evolution of 'Seek Shelter'. So after a smirking fake-out with the Nyman-esque 'Intro', 'Crush the Devil's Head' busses us to Manchester via Oxford, juxtaposing its cheeky melodica moans with Rønnenfelt's best Thom Yorke impression.

'Love How It Feels' sounds like Primal Scream reimagined by Yves Tumor, all thick sampled breaks, bolshy doomsaying and clammy glam undertones. There's an era-appropriate jaunt to Jamaica on 'Not Gonna Follow' that repurposes material Rønnenfelt recorded with The Congos and I-Jahbar when he was out in Jamaica a few years ago and sounds as if it could have fallen off the notorious '...Yes Please' sessions. And on 'Mona Lisa', he uses the Bobby Byrd 'Hot Pants' break that The Stone Roses famously twinned with Mani's enduring bassline on 'Fools Gold' - Rønnenfelt's tale of heartbreak isn't quite as toothsome, but it's a good indicator of where his head's at. A duet with Erika de Casier helps bolster highlight 'Blunt Force Trauma', and Rønnenfelt's Escho bandmate Fine - whose voice graces Two Shell's 'Home' - pitches in on 'Kill Your Neighbor', tapping into the seam between Denise Johnson and Hope Sandoval.

“Rocky Top Ballads” is the debut album of Copenhagen singer/songwriter and producer Fine. Woven around Fine's voice, with guitars, drums, samples, and synthesisers, the album visits both country and folk moods but with an underlying electronic world counter weighing. Recorded, produced, and mixed by Fine.

Clear vinyl. Edition of 500 The Danish-Chilean composer Molina (b.1992), explore the transformation between organic and synthetic musical landscapes. She weaves her own tapestry of dreamy guitar surfaces, soaring flutes and atmospheric vocals.

Smerz remixed by ML Buch, Clairo, Astrid Sonne, Molina, Erika de Casier, MIKE + Zack Sekoff feat. Elias Rønnenfelt & Fousheé, Clarissa Connelly, Toxe and more... Smerz use 'Big City Life EDITS' to temper the foundations of what's developing into a bonafide movement, linking early vanguards like Clairo and Toxe with modish scroll-pop exponents ML Buch, NEW YORK, Astrid Sonne and Erika de Casier. Smart, extant biz - and a good way to take the temperature on a scene that's rapidly finding its feet. When they debuted (on SoundCloud, of course) in the mid 2010s, Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt sounded as if they were out on their own, meshing subtle club deconstructions with a kind of listless, languid half-pop that sounded familiar but fitting in an era when the millennial obsession with arduous performance was about to topple from the edge of a cliff. For a new generation who'd been forced to acclimatize at an early age to their terminally online reality, their older cousins' preoccupation with bells and whistles was beginning to wear thin - a listless, twee and dreamy alternative was beginning to materialize. Simultaneously inspired by the experimental pop fringe (think Jessy Lanza), the free mixtape-fueled R&B/rap mainstream and their state sponsored Scandi musical education, Smerz characterized this new wave; indeed, when they released their latest album 'Big City Life', they were basically veterans, having spent the last few years engineering a sound that propelled them from Copenhagen to all the way to Seoul, co-producing K-pop group NewJeans' 'Get Up' EP with fellow Scandinavian Erika de Casier. Now they were part of a sui generis movement, alongside Pitchfork faves like ML Buch, Clarissa Connelly and Astrid Sonne. 'Big City Life EDITS' presents 14 remixes of the album, one for each track provided by crooked web of their friends and contemporaries - with an extra cut tacked on from Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt themselves. And they do a good job of using their stems to goad their loose scene into showing its scope. In typically irreverent fashion, they launch the record with a mix from Danish duo Yrdloop, one of the set's least starry inclusions. Still, founded by Rhythmic Music Conservatory alumni, Yrdloop immediately lay out the contextual landscape, transforming the piano-led 'Big dreams' into an iridescent mesh of instrumental vamps, Oneohtrix-inspired FM exhalations and shimmering acoustic strums. Sonne meanwhile replies to Smerz's killer edit of 'Say you love me' with her dusty, casually reflective cover of 'Easy', and NEW YORK add some essential Stateside absurdity to 'Imagine This', showing that there's DNA outside of Scandinavia. The majority of the reworks might cluster around Copenhagen - tracks from Fine, Molina, Erika de Casier, ML Buch, Haploplus+ and Clarissa Connelly - but this only allows the sound to harden around its core elements. Danish-Chilean singer-songwriter Molina adds a dubby, South American lilt to 'Roll the dice', and ML Buch provides radio-friendly, cybernetic soft-rock glam to 'But I do', while Fine backs up the homespun 'Rocky Top Ballads' with a suitably Mazzy Star-inspired cover of 'A thousand lies'. There's no real genre present, but there's a tangible vibe - an omnivorous appetite for music that culminates in restraint and nonchalance, not hyperactive DAW-powered extravagance. The inclusion of Clairo, who features on Smerz and VVTZJ's edit of 'You got time and I got money', is a canny acknowledgement of the American lo-fi pioneer's enduring influence and even Toxe, who helped blur the lines between experimental club music and pop with her STAYCORE collective, turns up to extend the sleepy 'Street style' beyond its original frame. If you're interested in studying the evolution of pop and the avant-garde, 'Big City Life EDITS' gives you a surprisingly clear, succinct overview.

Smerz continue to mark out sui generis wyrd-pop territory on their second proper full-length, this time for the on-fire Escho label, stripping away the club nostalgia and doubling down on oddball R&B harmonies and quirky DIY-cum-downtown NYC production tics - a sort of genius missing link between Astrid Sonne, Cibo Matto and Luscious Jackson.

Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt's earliest gear was a torch in a dark digital corridor, a prophetic look at a hazy pop future that blurred genre boundaries and trampled across the borders between the mainstream and the underground. Needless to say, they set the stage for a sound that's more or less orthodox in 2025 - we see Smerz's shadow on ML Buch's world-beating 'Suntub', or Erika De Casier's bedroom R&B groover 'Still', for example. And their contribution to the canon hasn't gone completely unnoticed; the duo co-produced K-pop girl group NewJeans' impressive 'Get Up' EP in 2023 alongside de Casier, and turned in an edit of Astrid Sonne's 'Say you love me' in 2024. If there's a discernible scene coalescing between Copenhagen, London and Oslo, Smerz are operating somewhere near the center.

So four years after threading supersaw-led trance-pop and rattly footwork-pilled kicks through a lattice of offhand skits and classical interludes on their impressive debut album 'Believer', Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt return to an art-pop landscape that's humming with energy. Fittingly, they reply by setting a new sonic benchmark, pruning their productions considerably and focusing on the bumpy, textural weirdness that often lurked in the distance on prior recordings. The best way to get a handle on this one is to scrub thru the duo's archive of NTS shows (they've been producing weekly bulletins for the best part of a decade), where you might hear Klein, Morton Feldman, Leila, Angelo Badalamenti, Young Thug or Kaskade alongside demos and cuts from like-minded peers such as Clarissa Connelly, Lolina and Peder Mannerfelt.

They're enthusiastic, discerning listeners who can cut away some of the cultural baggage to figure out links between vastly different sounds, and that's exactly the experience 'Big city life' provides. From the first few notes of the title track it's as if we've been dialed into NYC circa 1981, with rubbery microsampled half-riffs that project like they're being coughed out of a malfunctioning Fairlight CMI. Trading schoolyard rhymes back and forth, Smerz sing-rap nonchalantly over jerky MIDI piano and strangulated breaks, imagining a mid-point between day zero trip-hop and Craig Leon's enduringly influential 'Nommos'. And that intermixture of casual amusement and heads-y deep digging nourishes the entire record. There's the whipsmart Stereolab-in-dub vibe of 'But I do', 'Close' with its sad lounge and sensual Chicago lilt, and the lead single 'You got time and I got money', that's a raggy doll stitch-up of Air's 'Sexy Boy' and Verve's 'Bittersweet Symphony' covered by Neneh Cherry.

And just like on their debut album, it's Smerz's bijou, ostensibly throwaway moments that fully crystallize their narrative. They understand exactly what draws us back again and again to "classic" albums (and good mixes, actually), and pepper 'Big city life' with elegant, eccentric digressions, like the General MIDI player-piano loosie 'What', and 'Street Style', a stripped-back candlelit ballad that couches the bolshy TR-909-led 'Imagine This', a screwed-n-chopped Mantronix moment that accents their vast knowledge of '80s rap and electro. And if you're missing the old Smerz, they throw us a bone with the Autotune-d trance digression 'Dreams', leading us out of the album with a melancholy reminder that the flicker of the club is still there, somewhere, just distorted into a hypnotic, euphoric outline.

Respraying familiar bittersweet indie themes with contemporary DAW gloss, Danish duo Snuggle guide references to Cocteau Twins, The Sundays, Elliott Smith and Young Marble Giants thru modernist trip-pop structures that'll surely appeal to anyone into ML Buch, Erika de Casier, Smerz or that new James K record - another Escho smash basically.

Founded by Copenhagen underground mainstays Andrea Thuesen Johansen (of noise-rock trio Baby in Vain) and Vilhelm Tiburtz Strange (of smoove pop four-piece Liss), Snuggle is a fittingly modest Escho supergroup whose sound shouldn't be a huge surprise to devotees of the label. Baking themes that have been circling the RMC scene in the last few years, their debut album is almost sickeningly sweet - and hard to stop nibbling away at. It's a tray of detached, melancholy pop that's formed so flawlessly - rooted in a spread of sonic ingredients that we've never stopped going back to over the years - that it sits comfortably alongside contempo genre staples like 'Suntub'.

Theusen's voice falls somewhere between Alison Statton's and Harriet Wheeler's, cool, detached and achingly fragile, and is well matched by Strange's controlled but cannily penned miniatures. He sounds like Robin Guthrie covering 'Here's Where the Story Ends' at first on 'Dust', eventually offsetting the warbled, well-phased guitar chords with just-gritty-enough breaks that snap us in the direction of the trip-hop revival. Indie adorned with powdery boom-bap drums and samples wasn't a complete anomaly in the '90s - just poke thru the Grand Royal catalog and bands like Bran Van 3000 or Sukpatch, for example, who recently got a shot of adrenaline from Concentric Circles' reissue campaign. And the sound has finally come of age, an Ableton-era hallucination of music that's recognizable but not completely rinsed.

These elements are most prominent on the chugging, grungy opener 'Sun Tan' and the chirpy 'Driving Me Crazy', that's fleshed out with tasteful cello scrapes from Naja Soulie. But Snuggle lock into a deeper, more mysterious groove on 'Marigold' balancing out their dry, boxy drums with early Factory riffs before sliding towards Air's sensualized exotica in the final act, and Theusen's vocal melody is transfixingly twisty on 'Playthings', draped around splashy dubwise snares and a killer bassline from Strange. And although 'Sticks' sits way too close to the coffee table for our liking, 'Water in a Pond' sounds like Hope Sandoval singing Elliott Smith - unmissable, basically.