“I never actually wanted to be a DJ,” Simon Green, better known as versatile electronic producer Bonobo, recently told Mixmag. “It just kind of happened by accident.” Now, after 26 years spent exploring the nuances of downtempo and house music, he wants off the album-tour hamster wheel. Distance in Static is likely his last Bonobo album, he says—at least “in a traditional sense.” The British musician recently moved from Southern California to Japan and is eyeing film scores, art installations, and modular string quartets with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson as potential next steps. But for all his ostensible desire to stretch, he retreads familiar ground on Distance in Static.
Bonobo’s eighth album is his clubbiest album yet, a reflection of the sounds and textures that have shaped his evolution from downtempo mood-setter to headlining dance act. More victory lap than self-contained artist statement, it completes a trio of records—following his last two full-lengths, Migration and Fragments—that get progressively heavier in sound but lighter in ideas.
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Migration had, among many things, good timing on its side; released in 2017, it coincided with the post-EDM rush to reimagine what contemporary dance floors could sound like, and Green’s sensual, club-lite soundscapes perfectly met the moment—funky synths and devotional vocals drizzled over variations of UK bass music, often backed by live bands and full string sections. But that chill-adjacent formula doesn’t sparkle like it used to, and Distance in Static feels recycled, lacking the freshness and exploratory spirit that made Green’s earlier work interesting.
While Black Sands-era Bonobo was intriguingly hard to categorize—glitchy, funky, jazzy, and dubby, too heavy for “chill” and too heady for “club”—Distance in Static sounds as if each track was engineered to suit specific environments or playlists. There are groovy R&B-soul excursions like the Joy Crookes team-up “Always on Your Side,” sleek cosmic interludes like “ID700” and “Uncasually,” and billowing, eyes-closed, stadium-rave cuts like “Drift” and “Cycles,” which echo each other’s mournful, heartstring-tugging synths. Despite Green’s determination to play in multiple sandboxes, the tidily siloed nature of these tracks also makes them feel more anonymous.
“Me and You,” the project’s catchy lead single, should be a slam dunk—it’s bouncy, playful, tightly edited, and samples a 1950 Malawian field recording by ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey. And yet. Clever, crate-diggy samples should, theoretically, invigorate and surprise, so why does this song feel so dull? It rumbles forward almost obligatorily—emotionless, frictionless, compliant.
A few songs resist neatness. “Talk to Me,” which features Nicole Miglis of Hundred Waters, is an earworm that Green road-tested in his sets for years, inspired by a vocal warm-up he overheard while he and Miglis were on the road in Europe (you can hear the exercise in the chorus’s arpeggiated climb). The track draws on several scene-heavy sounds including ’90s R&B, UK garage, and trance, but feels sexy and original rather than calculated or compulsory. Later on, the hypnotic Arooj Aftab collaboration “Fire on the Water” is similarly immersive, transforming her Urdu vocals into thick sheets of sound.
