Most producers build a sound. Iglooghost builds a planet. There are creatures on it. There is weather. There is folklore. There is — this is not a metaphor — a fictional dialect. He sketches the maps himself, draws the characters himself, scores the climate himself, and then he releases an EP and the EP is somehow about all of it.
His name is Seamus Malliagh. He is from a tiny island off the south coast of England. He signed to Brainfeeder when he was 18 and his first record, Neō Wax Bloom, sounded like Hudson Mohawke and PC Music had been kidnapped by the same fairy. He has spent the years since inventing more and more elaborate excuses to make beats this strange.
Lei Line Eon was his hard pivot — a 2021 album about a synthetic spirit colony pretending to be ancient British folklore. Tidal Memory Exo, last year's release, picked up the same world from a different angle and added vocoder choirs that sound like they are singing inside a wet cave. Bronze Claw Iso, the new one this spring, is gentler. It still has the granular insect chatter and the impossibly fast hi-hats — but the centre of gravity has moved towards melody. There are actual hooks. He is letting the songs breathe.
I keep coming back to Softshell Maglev because it is the cleanest example of his current mode. A single-bar idea, repeated, stretched, pulled apart, finally allowed to resolve. He has always been a maximalist. He is now also a patient maximalist, which is rarer.
The ecosystem around him matters too. GLOO, the loose collective with BABii and Kai Whiston, keeps producing the kind of weird high-resolution pop that the streaming economy was supposed to make impossible. Their merch is beautiful. Their videos look like dreams of a console that doesn't exist yet. None of it is cynical. All of it is play.
If you want a starting point: Bug Thief, then Sylphiate Wing, then sit with Bronze Claw Iso on a long walk.
Allastair Voss
