about the record

New York-based collective toso toso presents their self-titled debut via Leaving Records. The album delivers an exploratory vision of avant-pop, where free improvisation meets intricate form. Tender and furious, the band navigates extremes of emotion and dynamics, playful and raw, crafting vivid contrasts and surprising turns that emerge seemingly out of nowhere. It’s a bold sketch of sound, where texture becomes narrative and experimentation feels instinctive.

Formed in 2020, toso toso is made up of producer, drummer, and sound designer Kabir Adhiya-Kumar, synth and keyboardist Rahul Carlberg, producer and guitarist Celia Hill, and interdisciplinary artist Isabel Crespo Pardo, the group’s vocalist and wordsmith. Each member brings a background in improvisation, a foundation that shapes their collaborative compositional process. Songs often begin as a single idea from one member, which is then looped, sculpted, and stretched collectively into unexpected forms. These fragments are transformed and sometimes mangled beyond recognition as they pass through the group’s shared sensibility, yielding music that is at once fractured and fluid.

The genre-agnostic sound of toso toso emerges from deep collaboration and a rare kind of creative trust rooted in friendship. Drawing from an eclectic palette, the group delights in creating new forms through juxtapositions, punchy synths colliding with existential lyrics, blastbeat drums arising beneath washes of reverb or snapping into terse, angular textures. The songs on toso toso walk a tightrope between stillness and cataclysm, balancing emotional intimacy with sonic extremity.

Over the course of seven songs, an abstract yet vividly figurative album takes shape. This striking debut is luminous and pointed, introducing a distinctly new territory of music making. With a sound that’s perpetually in flux, toso toso is never static, always becoming.