Tycho – Forge
Scott Hansen — San Francisco producer and visual artist, recording as Tycho — shares “Forge”, out now on Ninja Tune/Mom + Pop. It’s the instrumental precursor to “Boundary Rider”, his recent collaboration with Paul Banks of Interpol. The backstory: “Forge” was the original demo, stripped back, which Hansen sent to Banks to see if he’d be interested in adding vocals. Banks was. After finishing that version, Hansen returned to the demo to see what it could do on its own.
His account of the process is worth quoting directly: “It’s hard to find the elements to tie it all together once the vocals are gone. But with this one, it ended up feeling nicely balanced just by pushing Zac’s guitars to the front a bit, retaining the isolated sound of the vocal version while opening up more space for the instrumentation to breathe.” Zac Brown handles guitar duties in the live Tycho band, and the decision to foreground his playing is what makes “Forge” feel like its thing rather than a stripped version of something else. Hansen describes it as “a driving open-ended extension of the Epoch-era sound” — a reference back to the 2016 album, which sits at the cleaner, more melodic end of his catalogue. That lineage makes sense here. It’s a good instrumental, and I’d rather have it than not.
Tycho’s 2024 album Infinite Health was his sixth studio record. He’s touring North America through mid-2026, with festival stops at CRSSD and Okeechobee, plus a joint show with Washed Out at The Caverns in April.
Tour Dates North America:
- Mar 14-15 – San Diego, CA @ CRSSD Festival 2026
- Mar 19-22 – Okeechobee, FL @ Okeechobee Music & Arts Festival 2026
- Mar 28 – San Francisco, CA @ The Castro Theatre
- Apr 03-04 – Pelham, TN @ The Caverns (w/ Washed Out)
- Jun 20 – Bellvue, CO @ The Mishawaka
- Jul 24-27 – Shambhala Music Festival
