Techno Christmas in May

## The chart’s top 2 is sacred music

4 weeks ago, a 53-year-old Greek Orthodox priest who records alone in his house entered the chart at 13. He fell off. He came back at 17. He climbed to 16. This week, with the kind of casual disregard for chart physics that only sacred music can muster, Father Dionysios Tabakis is at 2.

The thing standing between him and 1 is Boards of Canada, an act that has not played a live show this century, recording from a bunker in the Pentland Hills out of a studio named after a 16th-century monastery. The chart’s number 1 and number 2 are both religious music.

18 new entries sit beneath them. One of those new entries was made by the Munich teenagers who, without most listeners knowing their name, drew up the template for nearly every retro-soul and neo-funk record of the last 25 years. We start at 20.

A producer who runs the school he came up through

Martyn is Martijn Deijkers, Dutch-born, formed in Eindhoven on drum and bass and dubstep, decamped to Washington D.C. to give the sound room to grow into something less easily named. Music for Existing enters at 20 with the most evenly split geography on the chart’s lower half: a quarter each in Britain and America, a long tail through the Netherlands, France, and Germany.

The music sits where bass architecture meets jazz feeling, released across labels from Brainfeeder to Hyperdub to his own 3024 imprint, which he co-founded in 2007 with the visual artist Jeroen Erosie and has since turned into a home for Jacques Greene, Leon Vynehall, and Ehua. Beyond the studio he hosts a monthly jazz show on NTS, writes a newsletter, and runs a mentoring program for the producers who come after him.

The Munich teenagers who made Sharon Jones possible

Karl Hector & The Malcouns at 19 with Yolek, and 92% of the listening is in the United States.

In the late 1980s, the Weissenfeldt brothers from Munich, Jan and Max, were hip-hop kids of the kind who buy the records to chase the samples. Where did the breakbeats on the rap albums they loved come from? Late-60s and early-70s American funk records, mostly out-of-print, mostly forgotten in the country that made them. The brothers began collecting, then began copying, then began playing. By 1992 they had a band called Poets of Rhythm and a debut single called “Funky Train.”

The roll call of names the Poets recorded under: Bo Baral’s Excursionists, Bus People Express, Dynamic Soundmakers, The Mercy Sluts, The Mighty Continentals, Organized Raw Funk, The Pan-Atlantics, The Polyversal Souls, Soul-Saints Orchestra, The Woo Woo’s. They were rebuilding a working studio aesthetic that the American record industry had abandoned 25 years earlier.

Bosco Mann of Daptone Records, the label that produced Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and, in the process, more or less invented the modern retro-soul sound that Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson would later run with, has said the line on the record more than once: Before Daptone, there was Desco. Before Desco, there were The Poets of Rhythm. No Munich teenagers, no Sharon Jones. No Sharon Jones, no Back to Black. No Back to Black, no decade of horn sections and tape-saturated 45s.

Karl Hector & The Malcouns is Jan’s later project, the one where he records as JJ Whitefield, alongside keyboardist Thomas Myland and drummer Zdenko Curulija. The conceit is more specific: where Poets of Rhythm chased American funk, Karl Hector pulls that funk into the experimental German rock tradition Munich itself produced. Amon Düül were Munich. Popol Vuh were Munich. Embryo were Munich. Yolek is the fourth Karl Hector record and the deepest pass yet into that soil, produced with Curulija and described by the band as “Kraut-Funk.”

A 9th solo album and a 90% home audience

Kevin Morby at 18 with Little Wide Open, his 9th solo record and the most American entry of any debut this week: 90% of listeners stateside, with Canada, Australia, Italy, and Switzerland filling out the rest. Kansas City raised, formerly the bassist for the noise-folk band Woods, formerly the frontman of The Babies, Morby has spent a dozen years on the road and the page building introspective, image-rich songs that draw equally from Dylan, Lou Reed, and Nina Simone. Number 18.

Eight years of near-silence, and a 5-track return

The Field is the Swedish producer Axel Willner, who works from Berlin and constructs records out of micro-sampled fragments of pop songs (a snatch of Lionel Richie here, a chord from Kate Bush there) stretched and looped into ambient techno that moves like weather rather than music. His 2007 debut From Here We Go Sublime landed on Pitchfork’s list of the best 100 albums of the 2000s and established a loop-as-architecture approach that the genre has been quoting back to him ever since. Now You Exist is his first record in 8 years, 5 tracks on Studio Barnhus, less club-ready than his Kompakt catalogue, more like instrumental post-rock built from tidal waves of static. Number 17.

Songs that do not end so much as gradually stop

Racecourse at 16 with July, December, a Santa Cruz five-piece built around the sun-bleached guitar interplay of brothers Jackson and Graeme Stage. The band started as a three-piece running reverb pedals through long ambient improvisations, the kind of songs that, in the band’s own description, do not end so much as gradually stop. Two years of new members later, the structure has hardened but the devotion to texture is intact. 95% American audience, Bandcamp New & Notable, comparisons to slowcore and the Pacific Northwest alt-rock tradition.

Pedal steel as the lead voice

In a south London room belonging to D.Rothon, the lead instrument is the pedal steel guitar, layered with keyboards, Omnichord, Mellotron, theremin, and an ever-widening cabinet of objects more associated with film scoring than song. Angel Pavements takes 15 with 85% of its listeners in Britain. The mini-album takes its name and atmosphere from early-to-mid-20th-century London novels by writers like James Curtis and Patrick Hamilton: the half-remembered city, the midnight walk, the era when literary realism in England was still measured in pubs and gas-lamps. Released on Clay Pipe Music, the same label that put out his 2018 Nightscapes, a record The Line of Best Fit called an instant classic. His pedal steel also sits on records by Marissa Nadler, Johanna Warren, Lost Horizons, and Pale Saints’ Ian Masters. Number 15.

A 10-year reissue, 97% American

Lotus at 14 with the 10-year expanded edition of Eat the Light, the Philadelphia instrumental quartet whose career across 28 years has been the quiet anomaly in jamtronica. Most bands in the field lean on extended soloing; Lotus has always led with groove and texture, threading analog synthesizers and rubbery bass through the vocabulary of classic electronic dance music. 97% of the audience for the reissue is in the United States. That figure has not moved in 28 years.

A 10-year remake, and a fan base that is not pleased

A decade ago Will Toledo released Teens of Denial. It took him from bedroom recordings to Matador and onto nearly every critic’s list of the indie rock records of the 2010s.

This month he re-recorded it.

Teen of Denial: Joe’s Story enters at 13, the more controversial entry of the week. Toledo went back into the studio with Steve Fisk, the original producer, replaced two songs with “Optimistic Son” and “Joe Drives Again,” rewrote the late-album epic “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia” as “The Ravenous House,” and built a full backstory for the album’s recurring narrator. The “Joe” of the original tracklist was a nod to Daniel Johnston’s “Hi, How Are You?” A decade later, Toledo gave him a name, a North Carolina college, and an annual horserace.

The fan response has split. Some hear deliberate softening: the four-letter words gone, “walking piece of shit” excised. Others point to the new songs, which are widely considered the strongest material on either version. The release is part of Matador’s Revisionist History Series. Number 13.

A band built out of wreckage

Street Sects is the Austin duo Leo Ashline and Shaun Ringsmuth, and the founding fact is that Ashline started the band in 2013 after 13 years of addiction. The music carries the wreckage in audible form: industrial rhythms, noise samples, screamed vocals, the sonic equivalent of a city block being demolished at 3 a.m. No Percentage in Caution enters at 12 with 97% of its listeners American, on a label (The Flenser) that has spent a decade specializing in heavy, harrowing music other people are not making.

The gold mine that became an EP title

Les Claypool bought a gold mine. Not metaphorically. An actual hydraulic mine, up in the mountains, where he and his son and his friends dig holes and try not to step on rattlesnakes. He told Bass Magazine about it earlier this year. “I’ve already found a handful of them.”

That handful is the EP title. Primus at 11 with A Handful of Nuggs, a surprise 4-track release that arrived on May 15 and is, by all accounts, the first taste of a 10th studio album the band intends to release in 2027. 9 years on from The Desaturating Seven, this is the first studio work to feature new drummer John “Hoffer” Hoffman. “The Ol’ Grizz” is the new song. A cover of Dio’s “Holy Diver” fronted by Puddles Pity Party (the singing clown persona of Michael Geier, a fact one should not have to explain twice). “Little Lord Fentanyl” with Maynard James Keenan. A live “Duchess (and the Proverbial Mind Spread)” from the Mann Center in Philadelphia. The audience is 89% American. Number 11.

A disused concrete laboratory in Cambridge

Sweeping Promises crystallized as a band in late 2019 inside what their own bio insists on calling a “disused and reverberant concrete laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” which is the kind of phrase you write down when you are confident the room is going to do half the work. Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug had been serial band-starters at Hendrix College in Arkansas and beyond; the breakthrough came when they tracked everything through one microphone and mixed it in mono. Their 2020 debut Hunger for a Way Out slipped out just as the world shut down and somehow found an audience anyway. You Say I Romanticize is their third album, due August 2026 on Sub Pop, pre-order at 10. The duo now operates a DIY recording compound in Lawrence, Kansas, where they continue to control every stage themselves. The critics named for comparison are the operatic precision of X-Ray Spex and the deliberate camp of Blondie and Devo.

Eastern horror, Nashville drumkit

Saidan at 9 is the Nashville duo Splatterpvnk and Hundosai (multi-instrumentalist and drummer respectively), whose music since 2020 has belonged to a corner of the underground nobody else has had the patience to map. Black metal’s raw shrieked attack grafted onto the theatrical excess of Japanese visual kei, themed end-to-end around East Asian horror: ghosts, mental illness, the dread between the two. FANGDRILLER: Scars Beneath Memory’s Wrist is their 4th studio album, on Avantgarde Music, with cover art by the Japanese visual artist Seiyak17 extending a linked narrative arc that has run across every release. The riffs are anthemic. The production is deliberately lo-fi. The whole project sounds nostalgic for an era of music that never quite existed.

Berghain, after the kid started drumming

Planetary Assault Systems is Luke Slater under his hardest and most percussive alias. Slater started drumming at 12, picked up synthesizers as a teenager, released his first track in 1989, and has built a catalogue across nearly four decades on Peacefrog, Ostgut Ton, Token, and his own Mote-Evolver imprint without ever quite sounding like he was chasing whatever the genre had already decided to do. He is a long-running Berghain resident in Berlin, a fixture at Dekmantel, Fabric, and Fuji Rock. Planetary People enters at 8 with the most European-weighted profile of the week: Germany 25%, Spain 12%, France 10%. Bleepy, polyrhythmic, industrial-strength techno, audible inside a few bars as nobody else’s.

From stoner doom to Yes-meets-Motorpsycho

Elder at 7 are approaching their 20th year of existence, formed in Massachusetts in 2006 and long since relocated to Berlin. They started as stoner doom. Across 7 studio albums, they have evolved into sprawling progressive psychedelic rock that critics now compare to Yes and Motorpsycho more readily than to Sleep. The 2024 tour opening for Tool at Madison Square Garden was the kind of inflection point most bands wait their careers for. Through Zero arrives with 90% American listening and the air of a record that has been earned the slow way.

Live guitar in synthwave

Sleepless Nights is a UK producer whose synthwave is built on lush layered synths and, less commonly for the genre, live electric guitar. The combination gives the music an organic warmth not standard in a field that mostly trades in Roland Juno presets. Moments Lost in Time enters at 6 on TimeSlave Recordings, a limited vinyl-and-cassette pressing with collaborators including Horizons 1982, Sandor Gavin, and Tyconic. One fan, the label notes, was reportedly left “unable to speak” by the guitar solos. The audience is half American with a substantial British and German showing.

Sprechgesang vocals over disco rhythms, with receipts

Getdown Services are Josh Law and Ben Sadler, childhood friends from Minehead, Somerset who relocated to Bristol and built one of British indie’s stranger double acts out of grooves, grievances, and absurdist humor. The vocals are sprechgesang. The rhythms are disco-inflected. The lyrics dismantle modern British life with the precision of a man reading aloud a receipt for something he cannot believe he bought. Massive Champion is their second album, on Breakfast Records, previewed by an appearance on Later… with Jools Holland and a sold-out international tour. 75% of the audience is British. Number 5.

The Lady in the Radiator, returning

Last week’s chart had the Pixies. Specifically, their 1988-97 B-sides compilation reissued for vinyl, which contained their cover of “In Heaven,” the song Peter Ivers wrote, with lyrics by David Lynch, for the radiator-stage scene in Lynch’s 1977 Eraserhead.

Xiu Xiu at 4 with Eraserhead Xiu Xiu, the band’s full-length tribute to the entire Lynch film, written after Lynch’s death last January and timed to follow up their acclaimed 2016 Plays the Music of Twin Peaks project. The new album exists simultaneously as a live concert experience, an accompanying film, and a studio record on Polyvinyl. The instrument list reads like the gear an exorcism would require: field recordings, concert-specific homemade instruments, organ, modular synths, electrical interference, flashlights. Jamie Stewart has been clear about why they did not just revive the Twin Peaks show, despite the requests: the Twin Peaks music exists in a recognizable orchestral milieu, and the Eraserhead universe does not. The album’s closing track is the same song the Pixies covered. The Lady in the Radiator gets her second appearance in 7 days. Number 4.

A 78-year-old’s most ambitious project

He turned 78 in January. He has been making movies for 50 years and music for 50 years, and the directing has wound down while the music has not. John Carpenter at 3 with Cathedral, which is, by his own description, his most ambitious project to date. Not just because it is heavier than the Lost Themes records or because Daniel Davies’s guitar steps to the front of the mix on tracks like “Lord of the Underground” and “Primeval.” Because the album is half of a project; the other half is his first-ever graphic novel.

The story was a dream Carpenter had in 2024. Downtown Los Angeles. An abandoned cathedral. A gruesome murder. Lieutenant Christine Marks and detectives Hernandez and Mayfield pulled into an investigation that leads them, inevitably, into catacombs where a centuries-old evil has been waiting. Each of the album’s 14 tracks corresponds to a chapter of the book.

The graphic novel, co-written with his wife and creative partner Sandy King alongside writer Sean Sobczak, releases on Storm King Comics on August 4. The album follows on August 7 on Sacred Bones, the same label that has put out every Carpenter record since the 2015 debut of Lost Themes. Where those albums were scores to imaginary movies, Cathedral is the score to a real graphic narrative he wrote himself. As Carpenter has phrased it: the closest thing to a new Carpenter movie since 2010.

His longtime band remains intact. Cody Carpenter on synths, the son. Daniel Davies on guitar, the godson, formerly of Karma to Burn and CKY. The audience is 75% American with a quarter scattered across Britain, France, Germany, and Australia. He scored Halloween on a budget so small the synthesizer parts repeated themselves into immortality.

The priest, at 2

We return to where we started. Father Dionysios Tabakis is a Greek Orthodox priest at the Church of Panagitsa in Nafplio, 53 years old, married with 3 children, of Asia Minor descent on his family’s side. He records alone, at home, in a configuration the Heat Crimes liner notes describe as a kind of operating system: Byzantine theory and practice as the logic, not the aesthetic; fretless electric guitar as the instrument that can hunt the microtones his voice already knows; qanun, oud, cumbush, ney, zurna, Politiki lyra, Pontic lyra, kabak kemane, yali tanbur as the other tools to hand. 150 dubbed cassettes, which in the current cassette market is more than most independent artists move ever. The Boomkat write-up called it WTF gear of the highest calibre.

The track titles are part of why he is at 2. There is “Ἠλεκτρικαὶ Ὑμνωδίαι,” Electric Hymnody. There is “Φῶς Ἱλαρόν καὶ Ἠλεκτρικόν,” in which the priest plugs in Phos Hilaron, the 4th-century vespers hymn that is the oldest surviving Christian hymn outside the Bible. There is “Techno σε ΜΟΝΑΣΤΗΡΙ,” Techno in a Monastery. There is “Ἄναρχος Θεός,” Eternal God, a setting of the traditional Byzantine Christmas carols in the first mode, subtitled in case the joke might be missed: “Techno Christmas,” at nearly 6 minutes the longest track on the album. There is “Δὸς ἀγκαλιάν, τῆς ἀγάπης πινελιάν!” (“Give a Hug, a Brushstroke of Love!”). And there is “Φλεξάρεις Κάργα,” subtitled “Ἐκκλησιαστικὴ Rap” (Ecclesiastical Rap). These are the song titles on the album of an Orthodox priest who serves at one of the oldest churches in a city renowned as a centre of Greek faith. He is not joking. He is also, very clearly, having fun.

The trajectory has now stopped being a curiosity and started being a phenomenon. Pitchfork weighed in with a glowing review by Grayson Haver Currin, who called it inspiring and idiosyncratic. Bandcamp Daily made it Album of the Day. Boomkat keep returning to it. 4 weeks on the chart (13, then off, then 17, then 16, now 2) is not a trajectory the chart has tracked before, and the audience is the most geographically distributed in the top 5: half American, with Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Greece all clustered roughly equally below.

The pre-order at 1, 6 days from existing

The Boards of Canada story has been told here three times now, and it remains the longest silence and the loudest return the chart has registered. 13 years between Tomorrow’s Harvest and Inferno. A bunker called Hexagon Sun in the Pentland Hills. The Redmoon nights at the ruined 16th-century monastery, bonfires burning down from a hundred to fifty as the night deepened. The cryptic VHS tapes mailed to fans. The reflected message on the studio website that read, when reversed: the internet is evil. wake up. The catalog number WARP496, requested by the duo themselves, jumping ahead of the label’s actual sequence. The 70-minute runtime, the number 70 carrying meaning in their work since “Sixtyten” and “The Smallest Weird Number.” The 18 tracks. The world has heard 1.

Inferno holds at 1 for the second consecutive week and the 5th week on the chart overall. It is also, in the world outside this chart, 6 days from existing.

The week in full

18 debuts. 2 survivors at the top, one of them up 14 places. The chart’s number 1 and number 2 are both sacred music. A priest at 2 with track titles like “Techno in a Monastery” and “Ecclesiastical Rap.” A bunker in the Scottish Highlands at 1 with a record that exists, for 6 more days, only as a pre-order. The Munich teenagers who made Sharon Jones possible sitting quietly at 19, 92% of their audience now in the country whose sound they once spent years rebuilding. A pedal steel record at 15. The Lady in the Radiator at 4. A gold mine that became an EP title at 11. A 78-year-old’s most ambitious project at 3.

The full chart is here. It resets next week. Inferno becomes a real album on May 29. The Sweeping Promises does not arrive until August. Half the records here will, by the end of summer, have stopped being pre-orders or anniversary editions or surprise EPs and become whatever they are about to be.

Which of them are still here in 7 days is, as always, the question only next week’s chart can answer.