Sylvan Esso

Sylvan Esso is the Durham, North Carolina duo of vocalist Amelia Meath and producer Nick Sanborn, a married couple whose creative partnership began after they met while touring in separate folk and Americana projects, a background that still grounds their electronic pop songwriting in real instruments, harmony, and place^[1].

The band's fifth studio album, Ow ∞, released September 11, 2026, was the hardest-won record of their career. Sessions planned for their North Carolina studio in fall 2024 were disrupted by the flooding of Hurricane Helene, and a subsequent stretch of work in Los Angeles ran directly into the wildfires that swept through the Palisades and the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in early 2025, fires severe enough to kill a dozen people and choke the air the duo was trying to write in^[2]. Meath has summarized the album's origin plainly, saying it was born between a flood and a fire^[3], and the band also lost a close friend during this same period, a private grief layered on top of the public disasters^[2].

Rather than pull back from those experiences, Sylvan Esso opened their process up. Ow ∞ is the most collaborative record they have made, built with the largest cast of guest musicians in their catalog, including six drummers, among them Glenn Kotche and Jenn Wasner, and additional players drawn from the orbits of Bon Iver, Frank Ocean, Wilco, and Wye Oak^[4]. It is also the first album released on Psychic Hotline, the independent label the pair founded themselves, an outgrowth of a broader push toward doing things on their own terms that also led them to pull their catalog from Spotify in 2025 over ethical concerns about the platform's leadership^[5].