Glade Leclerc - Tour (2026)

We’ll be honest, this one knocked our socks off when it landed in our inbox earlier this year. The debut collaborative album from Athens, Georgia’s Nick Glade and Quebec-based musician Nicolas Chabot-Leclerc is a stunning document that touches upon the pair’s “esoteric obsession” with obscure new age, yacht rock, ECM-style jazz, and ethereal indie. Tour is easily one of our favorite releases of 2026; eight tracks of utopian virtual-adjacent soundscapes and progressive electronic trickery.

Introduced to each other through a mutual friend in 2022, Glade and Leclerc had a pivotal meetup in North Carolina the following year. It was this trip that solidified the connection they made based on their shared musical influences. “We became fixated on capturing the sound that we believed was desperately trying to portray the essence of summer in all its analog innocence,” Glade tells us. “After not really having a direction of where to go with my own music, I proposed to Nico that we start a collaboration.” The entirety of Tour was made through file sharing over the course of two years, where the duo took an improvisational and unplanned approach by stacking ideas back and forth.

Mind-bending MIDI arrangements, crystalline synths, warbly ‘80s bass… it’s all here. We highly recommend this one for fans of Far Side Virtual, R Plus Seven, Orange Milk Records, Mark Isham, and Adrian Belew-era King Crimson. If that doesn’t sell you, we don’t know what will. Available on CD and digital formats September 4.