chainheld - indifferent (2026)

Virginia-born, NYC-based producer CHAINHELD widens Surf Gang's remit on 'indifferent', spiking his usual noized syncopations with Rephlex-strength synths, backroom pulses and gunked breaks.

If you've been following Surf Gang's output closely, you'll have noticed the sound shifting slightly. Eera's first solo album, 'Just Keep Holding On' swapped out cloud rap for vaporized EDM and even label figurehead evilgiane showed off his love of IDM on January's 'Giane 2' mixtape. Now it's the turn of CHAINHELD, who follows last year's brittle, trap-indebted 'n 0 l i m i t' with a suite of analog leads, mangled voices, weightless pads and skipping beats that have more in common with 'I Care Because You Do' than anything from the cloud rap pantheon.

On 'sweet nothing', the beatmaker materializes in 1997, gluing hazed nursery rhyme melodies over the kind of decelerated, choppy amens that Spymania woulda snapped up back in the day. And although there's more than just a nod to US EDM on 'dozing off', with its EDC-ready bass noodles, the track's filled out with cloudy guitar drones that you'd usually expect to find on a Windy & Carl album. CHAINHELD doesn't kick his usual sound to the curb though, you can hear the skeletal rhythm and overdriven TR-909 booms through a gauze of distorted ghost synths on 'now what', and the album's standout track is the anthemic 'it, hurts', that sounds as if it's just lying in wait for a vocal.