A Band That Chose to Stay Strange
There are bands that emerge from the lo-fi underground and gradually sand off their edges to become acceptable. Unknown Mortal Orchestra, the New Zealand-born project that Ruban Nielson has led since 2011 from his current base in Portland, Oregon, has done the opposite. Every record they have made has pushed further into the particular, the strange, and the specific. The audience has followed. Not because UMO made concessions but because they refused to.
Nielson grew up in Auckland, the son of musicians, surrounded by sounds that did not fit neatly together. Funk, soul, psychedelia, noise rock, the particular sonic heritage of the Pacific that gets filtered through New Zealand's specific version of isolation and humidity. He taught himself to play everything, to produce everything, to construct albums as environments rather than collections of songs. The environment is what UMO has always been selling, and in 2025 and 2026 it is more fully realized than at any point in their fifteen-year run.
From Bedroom to Biennale
The debut album, released in 2011 on Fat Possum Records, was recorded in secret. Nielson was still playing in a band called the Mint Chicks when he started making UMO recordings in private. He uploaded tracks to Bandcamp under the name Unknown Mortal Orchestra, thinking nothing much would come of it. What came of it was a Pitchfork review and an offer from Fat Possum and a label deal and a career.
The early records, II in 2013 and Multi-Love in 2015, established the core vocabulary. Fuzzed guitar tones that could have come from a different decade or a different planet. Falsetto vocals that felt like confession and comedy at the same time. Production that was intentionally imperfect, where the rough edges were features rather than bugs. "Swim and Sleep (Like a Shark)" and "Multi-Love" became the tracks that introduced UMO to wider audiences, but they also made Nileson nervous in a particular way. Making music that a lot of people liked was not necessarily the goal. The goal was making music that felt honest and strange. He has spent every record since finding ways to do both.
IC-01 Hanoi and the Father
The most important thing that happened in UMO's middle period is a record that most people who know their popular work have still not fully discovered. IC-01 Hanoi, released in 2018 on Jagjaguwar, is an instrumental album recorded in Hanoi, Vietnam, with Nielson's father and Vietnamese musicians. It is the first record in a series that Nielson has called the IC albums, initials for a phrase that he has never fully explained but that seems to stand for something related to intentional creation.
The album is not a departure so much as a revelation. It shows what Nielson is doing when he removes the obligation to write songs with words. The texture is patient and wide, built from the kind of improvisation that requires trust. Recording it with his father, the multi-instrumentalist Chris Nielson, made it something more than just a solo project. It made it a document of a relationship, of two musicians figuring out how to talk to each other in a language they were inventing in real time.
V and the Double Album Statement
In 2023 UMO released V, a double album on Jagjaguwar that is the fullest statement of what the project has become. Fifty-two minutes across two records, built from collaborations with GoldLink and India Shawn and Free Nationals and others, weaving together the melodic psychedelia of the early work with the rhythmic density that Nielson has been developing ever since. The record is ambitious in a way that most bands at this stage of their career can no longer afford. It says: we have not figured out what we are yet, and that is not a problem.
"The World Is Crowded" became the track that kept UMO in heavy rotation for the better part of two years. It is a song about being overwhelmed by the amount of information the modern world asks you to hold, but it does not panic. It breathes. It gives you room inside the feeling instead of just naming it from outside.
IC-02 Bogota and the Horror EP
2025 was the most productive year UMO has had since Multi-Love. In March, Nielson released IC-02 Bogota, the second installment in the instrumental series. Recorded in Colombia with a new set of musicians, the album is divided into three sections titled Earth, Heaven, and Underworld, each section corresponding to a different register of sound and a different kind of emotional pressure. If IC-01 Hanoi was about family and inheritance, IC-02 Bogota is about geography, about what it means to record in a place where the air and the altitude and the specific local musical history become part of the sound whether you intend it or not.
Three months later, in June 2025, came the CURSE EP. Six tracks inspired by Italian horror cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, a genre that Nielson has spoken about loving for its commitment to mood and dread and the unsettling use of synthesizer. The EP features "Boys With the Characteristics of Wolves" and "Death Comes From the Sky," titles that tell you exactly what kind of territory you are entering. It is not comfortable music. It is not trying to be.
The No-Setlist Live Show
The thing that defines Unknown Mortal Orchestra live is something that few bands attempt. They do not play from a setlist. Nielson determines the show in real time, choosing songs based on the room, the crowd, the feel of the night. A typical UMO set runs two hours with no announced track list, and no two shows are the same. This is partly a philosophy about music as a live event rather than a recorded product, and partly the result of Nielson's particular kind of restlessness. He cannot repeat himself with a clean conscience, so he has designed a show format that makes repetition structurally impossible.
The result is a live experience that rewards attention in a way that most modern concert formats do not. You are watching someone navigate, not execute. The choices being made in front of you are real choices, made under real conditions, with real consequences.
Still Going Somewhere
The 2026 European tour, including a four-night London residency at Earth and dates across the UK from Glasgow to Sheffield, confirms that Unknown Mortal Orchestra at this stage is a band with a committed audience that turns up specifically because they do not know what they are about to hear. That is a difficult thing to build and an even more difficult thing to maintain.
Fifteen years in, Ruban Nielson is still building. IC-03 is presumably out there somewhere, being recorded in a city that will give it its name and its atmosphere. The next album will be different from V, which was different from everything before it. The one reliable thing about Unknown Mortal Orchestra is that the only thing you can predict is a refusal to stay where they are.
