26 years is a long time to spend inside any creative identity, and Simon Green has spent the last few of them quietly signalling that his time as Bonobo, at least in the conventional album-tour sense, may be drawing to a close.
Distance in Static, released today on Ninja Tune, arrives carrying that weight. He has described it as likely his last “traditional” Bonobo record, with film scores, art installations and modular string quartet work beckoning from the other side. If this is a farewell of sorts, it’s a graceful one.
The album opens with “Dawn,” a brief, percussion-free neo-classical piece that does something immediately interesting: it recalls the meditative beauty of “Kiara” from Black Sands without copying it. Green is clearly revisiting his own back catalogue, but the mood is less nostalgia than recontextualisation, a man holding earlier work up to the light of everything he’s learned since and finding it still worth examining.
From there, the record moves with real confidence. “Cycles” lifts the tempo with stuttering beats, cascading strings and an emotional pull that would work just as well at 2am in a field as it would through headphones on a quiet afternoon. “Shokoufeh” is the moment the album fully opens up: built over what sounds like a Japanese sample and layered with siren vocals and a piano breakdown that feels designed to detonate live, it’s the kind of track that earns the reputation Green has built as a headline act. “ID700” goes harder still, its bass carrying a dubstep weight that demands volume. These are not background music tracks. They push back.
The collaborations are, as ever, carefully chosen. Arooj Aftab’s Urdu vocals on “Fire on the Water” are transformed into something atmospheric and enveloping, her voice becoming texture as much as performance. Joy Crookes brings warmth to “Always on Your Side.” Nicole Miglis of Hundred Waters contributes to “Talk to Me,” a track that draws on UK garage and 90s R&B without feeling like a genre exercise. And the album’s closing track, “Mercury,” featuring Kanako Yamamoto’s guzheng, brings everything down with a quiet elegance that makes you reluctant to let the record end.
Across the 14 tracks, lyrics arrive in English, Urdu and Japanese, with historic Iranian samples and recordings made at Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch sitting alongside Green’s own production – and yet the eclecticism never feels forced. Green has always had an instinct for how disparate materials cohere into something with a consistent emotional temperature, and Distance in Static has that in abundance.
Whether it’s his strongest album is a reasonable argument to have. What’s harder to dispute is that it’s a record made by someone in full command of what they do, who has also allowed themselves to be genuinely curious about where the edges lie.
