Sylvan Esso Pick Their Bandcamp Favorites
By April Clare Welsh · September 11, 2026
According to co-founder Nick Sanborn, Ow ∞, Sylvan Esso’s first album in four years, is meant to serve as a bubbly tonic for the “existential terror loop” that has a firm grip on all of us these days. Built around the grim inevitability that in life, “you’re just going to keep on getting hurt, but kind of in a silly way, forever,” the fifth LP from Sanborn and vocalist/co-producer Amelia Meath sets out to uplift, cycling through multiple genres in its effort to do so, among them: crafty glitchtronica, grungey fireworks, and elfin art-folk. Contrary to its doomy inspirations, Ow ∞ feels cool and restorative, like a dose of fresh air or the warm glow you get after spending time with people you like.
So it makes sense that the pair’s circle of friends and musical community were an essential ingredient. Meath and Sanborn cooked up the album with a cast of collaborators who regularly dropped by their Durham studio. “One of the ways that we started the record was that we had our friend Daniel Aged and TJ Maiani come out, and we just kind of built soundscapes together for two days,” Sanborn explains. “A lot of those ended up being the ground floor for the songs on the record. We recorded them in various ways and then turned those into samples.” (Other contributors include Buddy Ross, BJ Burton, Jenn Wasner, Matt Douglas, Glenn Kotche, Jake Luppen, James Mapley-Brittle, and Joe Westerlund.) “I just felt like I just wanted to be around our friends, you know?” Sanborn continues, adding that their local Durham scene is held together by a grassroots ecosystem of pop-up house shows and “random little things for those 30 people in a record store.”
The album is being brought to life in on a huge North American tour, which includes a spot at the pair’s own Good Moon festival in Durham this October—a homecoming gig that will no doubt bring them back into close contact with members of their treasured local scene. “I’m just much more interested in seeing everyone’s eyeballs and actually being in a room together than I have been in a long time,” says Meath.
We talked with the duo about their Bandcamp favorites, which span Indian classical, leftfield electronica, angular math rock, and much more.
Sanborn: I had been listening to a lot of Indian classical, and a friend recommended that label Biryani Boys to me. I wanted to listen to a lot of live tabla performance, and this record, for whatever reason—these two live performances—I just think is uniquely transporting. It feels lyrical and free and engaged in a way that I think makes it a step above a lot of other recent tabla music I’ve heard. And I think these are performances from 2013, but this is just one of those ones where I couldn’t believe there were only six people in the “supported by” thing on the album page on Bandcamp. I was like, ‘How is this not just a brick of avatars?’ You know what I mean? How is this not the standard, you know, ‘a thousand people have bought this record.’ So I thought it’d be a cool one to highlight, because I think it’s absolutely beautiful. And shows the depth of Indian classical on Bandcamp, which is so rich.
