Besides fronting the excellent post-rock band the Sea And Cake, Sam Prekop has had a pretty prolific solo career. Most recently, he released two albums in 2022: Sons Of with his bandmate John McEntire and The Sparrow. Today Prekop has announced his first new album since then, Open Close, arriving in September. Its lead single "Light Shadow" is out now.
Prekop recorded and produced Open Close in Chicago between summer 2024 and winter 2025. He brought McEntire back to mix the album, while Taylot Deupree mastered it. As per usual with Prekop, it involves a lot of modular synth, but he goes for a more organic sound here: "In my mind that’s what the modular is really good at doing, adding interesting and less predictable textural elements," he says in a press release. "That’s only one part of the dialog though. It energizes the other sounds and voices. Along with the steady rhythmic pulses I’ve been gravitating towards, the juxtaposition of those elements becomes a form of architecture within abstraction, just by imposing them on each other and layering them in a precise way."
"Light Shadow" is described as "a sprawling electronic metropolis," though I think that's applicable to a lot of Prekop's music. The track simmers over the duration of seven minutes, becoming something very pleasantly trance-inducing. Listen to "Light Shadow" and see the tracklist for Open Close below.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Open Close"
02 "Font"
03 "Para"
04 "Light Shadow"
05 "A Book"
06 "Opera"
Open Close is out 9/26 via Thrill Jockey.
