Distance in Static

Released by Ninja Tune on 11 September 2026, Distance in Static is Simon Green's eighth studio album as Bonobo. Green has suggested it may be his last conventional full-length for some time, but the record is better understood as a point of transition than a farewell. Its fourteen tracks were developed over three years in London, Tokyo, Los Angeles and at Broken Arrow Ranch in California, turning geographical distance into part of the album's method.

The short Dawn leads directly into Cycles, joining the opening pair through strings recorded in London and then played back through a small tape machine. That deliberate ageing establishes the album's central interest in signals altered by transmission. Fire on the Water places Arooj Aftab's Urdu vocal over a rough guitar loop, while Drift begins with a slightly unstable Prophet-5 patch. In each case, an incidental or imperfect source becomes structural rather than ornamental.

That process continues on Talk to Me, built from phone recordings of Nicole Miglis and Green singing in a reverberant corridor while touring. Its origin on the road connects naturally with an album assembled across several locations. Uncasually turns towards house and techno in memory of a late friend, after which Always on Your Side sets Joy Crookes against a vintage Höfner bass. The sequence moves freely between club construction and conventional songcraft, held together by Green's attention to texture and pulse.

The middle of the album is crowded with collaborators, yet their roles are specific. Nilüfer Yanya brings a guitar-led, live-band dimension to Youth's Fountain. Shokoufeh draws on an archival recording by the Iranian singer of the same name, using its rapid violin and vocal fragments as active material. Aanya Martin's phrases are cut and pitched through Can't You See, while ID700 emerged from a discarded demo shaped around Buchla modular synthesis. These different methods make the record's breadth feel purposeful, although the succession of voices sometimes leaves less room for a single idea to settle.

Me and You redirects the album towards the dancefloor with a vocal drawn from Hugh Tracey's mid-century field recordings in Malawi. The final pair then narrows the focus. Equinoctial layers recordings made with Ichiko Aoba in Tokyo, including Japanese and wordless vocals, before Mercury uses Kanako Yamamoto's guzheng as its foundation. Its reflective, orchestral close returns to the atmosphere of Dawn, giving a widely travelled record a clear formal boundary.

The title suggests meaning detected through interference, and Distance in Static repeatedly makes that idea concrete: tape noise, phone recordings, archival fragments and unstable synthesis all carry traces of another time or place. Green's polished arrangements occasionally smooth those differences more than they reveal them, but the underlying network remains audible in the record's design. If this is the end of one phase of Bonobo's work, it avoids a grand summation; its strongest gesture is the decision to remain open to other signals.