Bonobo – Me and You
Bonobo, the project of British producer Simon Green, has announced “Distance in Static”, his eighth studio album, due September 11 on Ninja Tune. “Me and You” is the lead single, and it’s been circulating for a while: Green has been playing it in DJ sets, including surprise pop-ups in London and Paris where fans were clamouring to identify the track. It’s a club-forward cut built around a four-on-the-floor kick and a vocal sample from a 1950s archive folk recording, that crackle of age sitting against contemporary electronic production in a way that gives the track its specific texture. Green told BBC Radio 1 that it was the first piece he made for the record, that it had been sitting with him for two years, and that the nostalgia in the sample was entirely intentional: “these voices from the past.”
The album was assembled across recording sessions in Los Angeles, Tokyo and London, with a significant portion made at Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch in California. “Migration” (2017) and “Fragments” (2022) both reached number five on the UK charts; this one carries a broader collaborative scope, with Arooj Aftab, Joy Crookes, Nilüfer Yanya, Ichiko Aoba, Nicole Miglis of Hundred Waters, Aanya Martin and Kanako Yamamoto all appearing across fourteen tracks. Lyrics span English, Urdu and Japanese, and the production draws on historic Iranian samples and guzheng recordings alongside Green’s own instrumentation. The title comes from an interest in shortwave radio and the idea of listening for a distant signal in the noise.
Green has been unusually candid about the album’s place in his career. He’s described it as probably the last record in this format, framing what comes next as a process of redefining how to be a musician. The new live show, designed by Pierre Claude (Air, Gesaffelstein, Phoenix, Caroline Polachek) and debuting on a North American tour this autumn, is part of that transition. For a producer twenty-five years in, “Me and You” sounds less like a greatest hits gesture and more like someone who still has things to figure out in the studio. That’s a good sign for the album.
“Distance in Static” is one of my ten most anticipated albums of 2026, and not just because of Bonobo. Arooj Aftab, Nilüfer Yanya, Ichiko Aoba, Joy Crookes, Nicole Miglis: any one of those would be reason enough to pay close attention. All five of them on the same record is something else.
