Sylvan Esso Ow New Album Arrives on Their Own Label After Flood and Fire

The making of Ow ∞, the Sylvan Esso Ow new album due this September, was interrupted by a hurricane, a wildfire, and four years of accumulated living, and the record sounds exactly like that kind of hard-won arrival. Singer Amelia Meath and producer Nick Sanborn have made something that sits between the euphoric and the undone, and it is, by some distance, the most exposed work of their decade together.

Plans to begin recording in the autumn of 2024 at the duo’s rural studio, Betty’s, outside Durham, North Carolina, were halted when Hurricane Helene flooded parts of the state. The pair then travelled to Los Angeles to continue writing, only for the city’s wildfires to erupt around them in early 2025. ‘Between a flood and a fire, and that’s kind of where the record itself was born,’ Meath said. There is something apt in that: Ow ∞ carries the texture of circumstances refusing to cooperate, and music made anyway.

Psychic Hotline and the First Self-Released Record

One of the more consequential decisions surrounding the album is a structural one. According to Consequence, Ow ∞ is being released through Psychic Hotline, the duo’s own imprint, making it their first self-released album. After a decade of working within the existing infrastructure of the music industry, that shift in control matters, not as a contractual footnote, but as context for an album that sounds, more than any of their previous records, as though no one outside the room had any say in its shape. Consequence also reports the release date as 11 September, though the duo had earlier indicated a 21 September date; listeners should watch the official channels for confirmation.

The album follows more than four years since 2022’s No Rules Sandy, a gap filled with a handful of singles (the frazzled dancefloor energy of ‘WDID’, the meditative ‘Keep On’) and, in April, a collaboration with Gregory Alan Isakov on an ethereal cover of Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade Into You’. None of those releases quite telegraphed where Ow ∞ was headed.

A Sigur Rós Sample and the Logic of Borrowed Sound

The album’s sonic ambition extends to its raw material. Northern Transmissions reports that Ow ∞ contains a sample of Sigur Rós, which speaks directly to Sanborn’s stated approach in the studio: ‘We got really into sampling, we did a lot of live drums, but we did a lot of drums that we then tried to make sound like samples. We wanted it to feel like something you had already heard before.’ The Sigur Rós interpolation extends that instinct into more explicit territory, pulling the vaporous, near-sacred atmosphere the Icelandic band refined on records like Ágætis byrjun into whatever strange space Sylvan Esso have built for themselves here. It is a curious and suggestive touchstone: not a stylistic ancestor for the duo exactly, but an emotional register they seem to be reaching toward.

The two singles released ahead of the album sketch the range. ‘Hot Slob’ is buoyant and oddly heroic, written by Meath on a day away from the studio. ‘It was born from deeply not really wanting to be in the world anymore,’ she explained. ‘I successfully wrote a silly and sad anthem about embracing being a mess.’ ‘Concrete Glen’, shaped in part by keyboardist and sometime collaborator Buddy Ross, began as something approaching country music before becoming, in Meath’s description, ‘a weird wash, like oil on pavement after the rain’. Elsewhere, ‘Sledge’ collides a frazzled guitar riff with glitchy electronics and drum beats that sit between the organic and the digital. The 2-minute ‘Ribbon’ is constructed entirely from layered a cappella vocals: ‘It’s incredibly intimate,’ Sanborn said. The album opens with ‘Entertainment & Coca-Cola’, which Meath calls ‘a slip of a song’.

The lyrical approach on Ow ∞ continues a process Meath began consciously on No Rules Sandy. ‘With No Rules Sandy, I was really personal, experimenting with actual honesty versus the performance of honesty,’ she said. ‘In the writing of these songs, I’ve kind of given up trying to do the artifice.’ She described the method as fishing: ‘You just open up your little brain and be like, What’s here today?’ Sanborn, watching from the outside, puts it differently: ‘She’ll come in and sing this straight thing that is the perfect encapsulation of the last 20 conversations that we’ve had, but in a way that is distilled. I have no idea how you do it.’

The Residency at Sid the Cat and a Full Band on Stage

The Sylvan Esso Ow new album material received its first live airing during a weeklong residency in June at the 500-capacity Sid the Cat Auditorium in South Pasadena, a former elementary school assembly hall. Sylvan Esso expanded from a duo to a full band for the residency, performing the entire album each night in what the announcement described as ‘rehearsing with a live band and sharing new songs’. The five shows sold out in approximately 30 minutes.

The format allowed some deliberate breaks with habit. One night’s set contained no ‘Coffee’, the duo’s 2014 breakout single, for the first time. ‘I love that song and I’m very grateful for what it’s done for us,’ Meath said. ‘But it felt like such an amazing thing to just exist without that as a contextual piece.’ Sanborn reflected on the strangeness of it: ‘It was kind of weird the first night to walk out on stage and be like, “Oh, we haven’t had this experience in 10 years.” It felt good.’

The month before the album’s release, the duo performed at the Broad in Los Angeles on 8 August, joining Yo La Tengo, Nels Cline, Sleater-Kinney, Kathleen Hanna, Rufus Wainwright and others for a concert of Yoko Ono music curated by Yuka Honda. Sylvan Esso performed ‘Sisters, O Sisters’ and ‘Walking On Thin Ice’. Asked about Ono, Meath offered a thought that doubles, perhaps, as a private aspiration: ‘She’s one of those people that has survived so much abuse with so much grace. Instead of disappearing, she’s just continued to step more into the light.’ Ow ∞ is, among other things, a record about exactly that kind of refusal to recede.