Elder Orange is a producer from Vermont who first started releasing music in 2014 as part of the now defunct World Around Records. All he’s put out so far have been singles and contributions to some collaborations. Now, he’s finally ready to release his debut album, All My Friends Believe in Ghosts.

There are a lot of different ways to approach a solo instrumental album, whether it be sample-based beats, or a series of collaborations, or any number of things. The approach that Elder Orange took was to utilize his full skill set, which is to say that he used his talents as a multi-instrumentalist and built the album from the ground up. He did get some assistance along the way from Louis Mackey, Adam Turner, Heather Sommerlad, Alex Wolston, and Dr. Quandary, but it’s all done in service of the vision that Orange had for this album. As you listen to the album, you can really get the sense that Orange wasn’t just writing a few songs and hoping that they’d make sense on an album together, but that he thought really carefully and worked on each song not just as its own thing, but in service of the whole listening experience. The result is an album that flows incredibly well from start to finish, sounding more like one grand composition broken up into movements rather than a collection of songs that kind of fit together. The sound of the album is one that walks the line between instrumental hip hop and a guitar-driven post-rock, with slow builds, gentle melodies, and good use of dynamics. It’s not music that’s going to knock you over at first, but if you spend some quality time with it, you can really get lost in all of the subtle movement and swirling instrumentation very easily. It’s an album that built with headphones in mind, and something that you can really develop a personal connection to.

Normally, when an artist is dropping their debut album, they are usually working through the process of figuring out what their artistic voice, and how to combine all of their influences in a way that makes sense, and how to record themselves. In the case of Elder Orange, it’s clear that he took the time to sort things out and really burrowed down and took the time to learn how to make the vision in his head a reality. The result is a debut album that is incredibly mature, well-composed, and complex. I can’t wait to see where he goes from here.