Sam Girling makes his Hessle Audio debut with Drive By Strokes / Primrose Mountain, a two-track release that captures the euphoric yet stripped-back direction his music has taken over the past year. The Bedford-born producer and DJ has increasingly focused on late-night club music with a strong UK foundation, balancing tension and urgency via the melodic playfulness that runs through his work. That shift has become more pronounced across his recent releases and through Attacca, the party series and label Girling runs alongside his own productions. Tracks from this period have found their way into the sets of Ben UFO, Call Super and Surusinghe, helping establish a distinct signature sound which feels unmistakably modern but harks back to the dizzying genre splicing of the early 2010s, when Hessle Audio was establishing itself. Both Drive By Strokes and Primrose Mountain have already developed a life of their own through DJ sets in the months leading up to release. "It's been surreal to watch people develop a familiarity with these tracks over the last few months from the guys' sets, and now my own!" Sam says. "Ben closing out Dekmantel with 'Drive By Strokes' was such a moment for me. I get people coming up to me every set talking about it and it's become my closer too now. I'm so proud to have this 2-tracker out on Hessle Audio."

Hessle Audio returns with Undertow, a new four-track EP from Swiss drummer, composer and electronic artist Arthur Hnatek. The first new release on the London label since Jasmin's Bite The Hand That Feeds You EP in October 2025, it introduces Hnatek's highly physical approach to electronic music. Based in Zurich, Hnatek has previously collaborated with artists including Barker and Stenny, while his solo work has drawn on his background in jazz, improvised music and club-oriented electronic production. Hnatek began Undertow with long, unplanned drum improvisations recorded across Brooklyn, Berlin and Switzerland, treating the performances as raw material, cutting, reducing and transforming them until rhythm begins to suggest melody, harmony and atmosphere. Using resonators, vocoders, tuned delays, spectral processing and the Torso S4 sampler, he gradually extracts an electronic vocabulary from the recordings themselves. Hnatek says "I felt a growing need to return to the drum kit with no plan other than to play. I wasn't trying to make electronic music with drums layered on top. I was interested in whether an entire electronic language could emerge from the drum recordings themselves." Across Undertow, the physicality and unpredictability of the original performances remain present even as the recordings are pushed into increasingly abstract territory.