Chazwick Bundick has spent his career making it impossible for anyone to predict what a Toro y Moi album will sound like. Chillwave. House. Funk. Lo-fi pop. R&B. Each record has shifted the coordinates while maintaining something ineffably Chaz about the whole thing.
Hole Erth, his eighth studio album, released in September 2024 on Dead Oceans, is perhaps the most extreme pivot yet. Pop-punk energy. Autotuned rap. Collaborations with Don Toliver, Kevin Abstract, and Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie. If you came in expecting Causers of This Part Two, Hole Erth will disorient you. That is the point.
What Hole Erth Actually Sounds Like
The album opens with an energy that references early 2000s alternative rock and immediately makes clear that Bundick is not interested in his own comfort zone. The production is noisier than anything in the Toro y Moi catalog. Guitar has presence. The 808s that populate the middle section of the record share space with live drum sounds, an unusual combination that creates a texture specific to this album rather than borrowed from any genre convention.
The Don Toliver collaboration is the most surprising element and the one that most clearly demonstrates Bundick's range as a collaborator. Toliver's melodic approach and Bundick's production instincts create something that neither would make alone. Kevin Abstract's contribution pushes in a different direction, rawer, more textural, less melodically resolved. Benjamin Gibbard's presence anchors the record's emotional center, his voice carrying a kind of earnestness that the surrounding production never entirely abandons even at its most abrasive.
The result demands active listening rather than ambient reception. Nothing here works as background. Every track makes a specific claim on your attention and expects you to respond to it directly.
The Chillwave Origin and What Came After
Bundick's emergence in 2010 through the chillwave movement, a briefly named genre centered on washed-out nostalgia and lo-fi tape aesthetics, gave him an audience that he has consistently refused to satisfy in obvious ways. Causers of This (2010) and Underneath the Pine (2011) established the project's initial character. Then came Anything in Return (2013), which pushed toward club music and expanded the audience significantly.
What emerged across the subsequent decade was a pattern: each album proposing something new, each album retaining enough of what makes Bundick's work immediately recognizable that the pivots never feel arbitrary. The voice is always present. The melodic sensibility remains even when the genre frame changes entirely. Something about the specific weight and tone of his productions is consistent across chillwave and house and funk and noise rock.
Les Sins and the Side Projects
Bundick's side project Les Sins, his more explicitly dance-oriented alias, has been dormant since a joint EP with AceMo in 2020. The last full-length under that name was Michael in 2014. But the influence of Les Sins bleeds into everything Bundick touches. The rhythmic adventurousness, the willingness to let a groove dictate structure rather than verse-chorus convention, is present across all his work.
The fact that Les Sins has been quiet while Toro y Moi has absorbed its energy suggests that Bundick no longer needs the separation. The main project has become capacious enough to hold everything.
The Tour and What Comes Next
A winter 2025 North American headline tour with Panda Bear as support ran through February and March. An unplugged reworking of Hole Erth, titled Unerthed, was announced for later in 2025. The decision to immediately revisit the material in a completely different mode suggests an artist who is not done with these songs even as he moves past them. That restlessness is the constant.
Bundick also released the Sandhills EP in 2023, a smaller project that served as a bridge between the lush production of Mahal and the rawer energy of Hole Erth.
The Career
Toro y Moi is one of the most consistently interesting artists in independent music. Not because every album is a masterpiece, but because every album is a genuine attempt to do something he has not done before. In a landscape where artists are rewarded for repeating themselves, Bundick's refusal to stay still is its own kind of excellence.
Hole Erth is the most extreme version of that refusal. It is also, by some measure, his most ambitious album. Both things follow from the same commitment.
The most important thing Bundick has proven across his catalog is that artistic restlessness does not require abandoning coherence. The Toro y Moi discography hangs together as a body of work despite spanning more genres than most artists attempt in a lifetime. That coherence comes from him, from his specific sensibility applied consistently to different raw materials. That is the rarest skill.
In practical terms, this means that a listener who finds Hole Erth first and works backward through the catalog will encounter different music at every step without ever feeling like they have encountered a different artist. The coordinates change. The intelligence behind them does not. That is a life's work in progress.
The Chillwave Debt and Why It Does Not Apply
Every article about Toro y Moi eventually circles back to chillwave, the microgenre that Bundick helped invent in 2010 alongside Washed Out and Neon Indian. The tag has been both a gift and a trap. It gave him early visibility and has since functioned as a ceiling that some critics cannot see past. Hole Erth is the furthest point in a deliberate decade-long argument against that ceiling.
The irony is that the qualities that made Causers of This work, the textural density, the layered production, the willingness to treat mood as a structural element rather than a byproduct, are present on every subsequent record including Hole Erth. Bundick did not abandon his sensibility when he changed his sound. He found new materials to build it from. The pop-punk energy and AutoTuned vocals of this record serve the same purpose as the washed-out synthesizers of his debut: they create a specific atmosphere, and the atmosphere is the point.
Listeners who came in expecting chillwave and left disappointed have been making the same mistake with each record since Anything in Return in 2013. At some point, the pattern of reinvention is itself the statement. Bundick will change again. That is what he does, and it is enough.
