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Bonobo Names His 25th Anniversary Album Distance in Static

Simon Green marks two and a half decades as Bonobo with a record he says might be his last in this shape.

Anniversary albums usually play it safe. Distance in Static does the opposite. Twenty-five years into the Bonobo project, Simon Green has made a 14-track record and then told the world, in his own words, that "it's probably the last go-around the track in this format." That's not retirement talk — Green frames the album as him "redefining how to be a musician from here" — but it does mean Distance in Static, due September 11 on Ninja Tune, arrives carrying more weight than the average milestone LP. A birthday record that might also be a goodbye to a working method is a stranger, more interesting thing than a victory lap.

The making of it matches the ambition. Sessions ran through Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, and Neil Young's Broken Arrow Ranch in California, and the finished album carries lyrics in English, Urdu, and Japanese alongside historic Iranian samples and guzheng recordings. That's a lot of geography and history to fold into one tracklist, and it explains why Green needed a full album's worth of space rather than a tight EP to say whatever this is building toward.

## A Guest List That Reads Like a World Tour

The featured vocalists do a lot of the storytelling here. Arooj Aftab appears on "Fire on the Water" (track 3), Joy Crookes on "Always on Your Side" (track 7), and Nilüfer Yanya on "Youth's Fountain" (track 8) — three artists with almost nothing in common stylistically except range. Later, Ichiko Aoba closes things out on "Equinoctial" (track 13) and Kanako Yamamoto on "Mercury" (track 14), with Nicole Miglis of Hundred Waters and newcomer Aanya Martin also credited across the record. That's seven guest vocalists spanning Pakistan, the UK, Brazil, and Japan on a single Bonobo album, which tells you Green is treating collaboration itself as the organizing idea rather than a guest-verse afterthought.

Against that backdrop, the choice of lead single is a small provocation. "Me And You" is the club track, road-tested in DJ sets and pop-up shows in London and Paris before the album's announcement — the kind of song built to be tested on a dancefloor rather than unveiled cold. Pairing a floor-facing lead single with a tracklist full of hushed, multilingual guest features is a specific kind of sequencing decision, one that promises contrast rather than a single mood sustained for 14 songs.

## The Stage Show Is Getting Rebuilt Too

Green isn't just changing the studio process — the live show is being redesigned by Pierre Claude, whose past work includes staging for Air, Gesaffelstein, Phoenix, and Caroline Polachek. That's a notable step up in visual ambition for an artist whose live résumé already includes a five-night residency at the Royal Albert Hall and sold-out nights at the Sydney Opera House and Red Rocks. North American dates are already locked for November and December, including The Wiltern in Los Angeles on November 11, State Theatre in Portland, Maine on December 1, and Brooklyn Paramount on December 5 — a run that suggests the new production is meant to be experienced in rooms built for spectacle, not just sound.

None of this happens in a vacuum. Green has two UK Top 5 albums behind him in Migration and Fragments (2022), plus multiple BRIT and Grammy nominations and past collaborations with Erykah Badu and Damon Albarn. He's not an artist chasing relevance — he's one deliberately unsettling a formula that's already worked twice. Pre-orders for Distance in Static, including vinyl and CD, are open now through Ninja Tune.

If this really is the last Bonobo album built this way — long-haul sessions on three continents, a guest list assembled like a diplomatic roster, a single tested live before it's official — the more useful question isn't whether Distance in Static will land. It's what "this format" even meant to Green after 25 years, and what he thinks comes after it.

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