A pioneer of 1990s electronica and Warp Records, the British group resurfaces, still buoyant in zero gravity.
More than thirty years ago, at the dawn of the 1990s, Seefeel introduced its guitars into the hushed world of intelligent techno — a label Warp wore at the time — which sought to push electronic music beyond the club toward more experimental and contemplative terrains.
The historical record notes that Seefeel, with a lineup that evolved over the years, was the first guitar-based outfit signed to Warp, long before the Sheffield label would pivot toward alt-rock at the turn of the new millennium.
A Reworked Language Between Ambient and Industrial
Linked to the shoegaze milieu for its kinship with Cocteau Twins and its sculpting of electric guitars, Seefeel gazed across the boundaries of shoegaze on their debut album. A Quique (1993) brimming with dubby sensation, electronic loops, samples and hushed vocals, which at times recalled the unsettled atmospheres of Section 25 on Factory.
But it was with their second LP, Succour (1995), that the group clearly moved away from conventional rock templates to forge its own language, drawing from electronic production a fresh idiom that unfurled with grandeur, straddling ambient and industrial, with lush textures and tensile tensions, somewhere between the austerity of Autechre and the contemplative universe of Boards of Canada.
Falling off the discography radar in 2011, despite ongoing live activity and multiple lineup changes, Seefeel was finally rehabilitated in the 2020s through exhaustive compilations and expanded reissues, a move aimed at reviving their textured, floaty landscapes for today’s listeners.
A rediscovery that likely pushed the group back into the studio, as evidenced by the mini-albums Everything Squared (2024) and Squared Roots (2024), where Seefeel’s formula is refined toward horizons that feel more placid, at least on the surface.
In Orbit in the Ether
This new album, the first in fifteen years, unfolds as more vaporous than ever, as if it were perched in an orbit within the ether. With their ghostly, hypnotic vocal loops (still provided by Sarah Peacock), their rhythms diffused by dub and dulled, and their basslines pulsating in echo, the nine tracks mark a new phase in Seefeel’s orbit, a perfect complement to a contemporary ambient scene in the midst of redefining itself.
Unfolding in dotty layers across repeated listens, Sol.Hz reveals a pointillist geometry of stacked sonic strata, signaling the triumphant return of a cult outfit and asserting itself as the imagined soundtrack to a Blade Runner–style science-fiction film.
Sol.Hz (Warp/Kuroneko). Release May 1.
