Cubzoa – HAYBOY
Jack Wolter — who makes music as Cubzoa and plays guitar in both Penelope Isles and CMAT — has announced a new collaborative EP with Brighton producer Luke Phillips, who records as Icebeing. The Cubzoa vs Icebeing EP arrives Friday, 13th March via Bella Union, and lead single “HAYBOY” is out now.
“HAYBOY” has a long history in Wolter’s catalogue — it appeared on the very first Cubzoa release and got tried out in Penelope Isles too. This version doesn’t tear it apart the way some other EP tracks do; Wolter and Phillips worked on it together, reshaping rather than dismantling. The result sits somewhere between bedroom electronics and something more cinematic: layered harmonies, textural glitching, and a chord sequence toward the end that Wolter himself calls his favourite moment on the record. “The rainbow-like, euphoric chords Luke introduces toward the end is one of my favourite moments on the EP”, he says. What catches my ear is how much patience goes into the track — it builds gradually, and Phillips knows when to hold back.
The EP itself is a back-and-forth exchange between the two, built mostly online. Three tracks from Wolter’s debut solo album Unfold In The Sky — released last Autumn to solid notices — get reworked here, alongside three new songs. “Orange Peel” gets a similar treatment to “HAYBOY”, while “Stuck” is the most experimental: a pitched-up, vulnerable demo fragment stretched into something closer to ambient drift, built from discarded orchestral textures. Wolter and Phillips are both part of the Bella Union circle and the Brighton studio scene, which gives the project a sense of shared language rather than an awkward handoff.
It’s a low-key release in the best sense — no grand statements, just two producers who know each other’s instincts and made something interesting from that. I picked “HAYBOY” for the week because it rewards a patient listen, which is increasingly rare.
