Sylvan Esso – KEEP ON
Sylvan Esso release “KEEP ON”, the B-side to their recent single “WDID” and their first music via their own label, Psychic Hotline. The six-minute track came together from two creative sessions years apart, showing the band in a new, unfettered space.
The instrumental foundation was born from a week of improvisation with bassist Daniel Aged (Frank Ocean, Dijon) and drummer TJ Maiani (Weyes Blood, Neneh Cherry) back in 2023, then sat dormant on a hard drive for years. The distorted vocoder line arrived in January 2025 when Amelia Meath recorded it while the band worked on new music in Los Angeles. The city was on fire, apocalyptic, and that tension lives in the final track. The simple loop of “KEEP ON fucking at the end of the world, yeah” flits in and out over the undulating, amorphous instrumental.
When Nick Sanborn stumbled back onto the 2023 instrumental and wove it with Meath’s vocal, both parts grew into each other naturally. The result is a shapeshifting piece that plays with elements of electronic dance music, jazz, pop, and folk while remaining deeply intuitive. It occupies new territory for Sylvan Esso, a creative dispatch from right now.
Meath and Sanborn have spent the last year recording in Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s lush woods with no deadline, working with new collaborators and letting the songwriting stay loose and vulnerable. The physical 12-inch with both “WDID” and “KEEP ON” drops January 9th. The video, made with Stewart Owen Dance Company and directed by Josh Finck, accompanies the release.
After four albums and collaborations with artists like Arooj Aftab, Maggie Rogers, Moses Sumney, and The Postal Service, plus arena shows at Madison Square Garden and Forest Hills Stadium.
