A Winged Victory for the Sullen

Bologna, a tour van, and a duo that nobody planned

A Winged Victory for the Sullen began in 2011, which makes it one of the longer-running partnerships in a corner of music where collaborations tend to be one-record affairs. Adam Wiltzie, born in New York City on 17 September 1969, had already built a reputation twice over: once as half of Stars of the Lid with Brian McBride, and again as a working live sound engineer for The Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Iron & Wine and Sparklehorse. It was on a Sparklehorse tour, in Bologna, that he met Dustin O'Halloran. Wiltzie's account of what happened next has not changed much in fifteen years of interviews: they clicked, and writing together turned out to be easy.

O'Halloran came from a different direction entirely. Born in Phoenix, Arizona on 8 September 1971, he grew up largely in Hawaii and Los Angeles, studied art at Santa Monica College, and formed the indie band Devics there with the singer Sara Lov in 1998. Devics signed to Bella Union in 2001 and the pair relocated to Romagna in Italy, which is where O'Halloran's solo piano records began. Wiltzie, meanwhile, settled in Brussels and has stayed. The geography matters: the duo has never had a shared home city, and the records have always been assembled across borders.

Four albums, each one further from the last

The self-titled debut arrived in 2011 on Erased Tapes, with a Kranky release for the American market — two labels that between them account for most of the project's catalogue alongside Ninja Tune. It set the template: piano and strings recorded close, electronics underneath, pieces that take four or five minutes to arrive at the thing they are about, and song titles that puncture the solemnity of the music. 'We Played Some Open Chords and Rejoiced, for the Earth Had Circled the Sun Yet Another Year' is the debut's closing statement and remains the closing statement of their concerts.

Atomos followed in 2014, with an Atomos VII EP alongside it, and widened the palette considerably. The Undivided Five came on 1 November 2019 through Ninja Tune, built around the paintings of Hilma af Klint and 'The Five', the group of women she worked with, and around the intervals between notes rather than the notes themselves. It was recorded in the duo's own studios in Berlin and Brussels and then in four other rooms: Studio 22 at Magyar Rádió in Budapest, the Église du Béguinage in Brussels, Ben Frost's studio in Reykjavík, and a woodland studio in northern Italy. The lead tracks, 'The Rhythm of a Dividing Pair' and 'The Haunted Victorian Pencil', were their first new music since a 2017 film score.

Invisible Cities, released 26 February 2021 on Artificial Pinearch and Ninja Tune, is the fourth and most recent album. Nothing has followed it in five years.

The commissions are the interesting half of the catalogue

A good deal of the duo's most ambitious work was written for somebody else's stage. Atomos began as the original score for a Wayne McGregor dance piece, premiered at Sadler's Wells in London in 2013 and only afterwards turned into a record. In 2015 they played the Royal Albert Hall as part of the Proms, sharing the bill with Nils Frahm.

Invisible Cities went the same way. It was composed for a ninety-minute multimedia theatre production after Italo Calvino's 1972 novel, directed by the video designer Leo Warner, which premiered at Manchester International Festival in July 2019. The staging was meant to tour; the pandemic stopped it, and the score was released on its own two years later. Critics were largely convinced even without the choreography and the projections — Metacritic aggregated nine reviews to 80 out of 100, with The Line of Best Fit at 9/10, Clash at 8/10, AllMusic at four stars and Pitchfork at 6.9.

There are two proper soundtracks under the duo's name as well: Iris in 2016 and God's Own Country in 2017.

Two solo careers, both busy

Part of the reason the gaps between albums keep lengthening is that both halves of the duo have substantial careers running in parallel. O'Halloran won a Primetime Emmy in 2015 for the main title music to Transparent, and in 2017 was nominated for both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Score for Lion, shared with Volker Bertelmann. He signed to Deutsche Grammophon in 2019, released the solo album 1 0 0 1 there in 2024, and scored Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and Eleanor the Great in 2025. He now divides his time between Reykjavík and Los Angeles.

Wiltzie's 2024 solo record Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal came out on Kranky. His bigger recent project is Friendship Survival Guide, a collaborative album with the late Jóhann Jóhannsson released on 18 September 2026 by Deutsche Grammophon, drawn from sessions the two recorded between 2013 and 2017 and finished by Wiltzie after Jóhannsson's death in 2018. The two had already worked together on the scores for The Theory of Everything and Arrival.

Where things stand, October 2026

There is no fifth album announced. What 2026 delivered instead was the touring year the duo lost in 2020, laid out as nine concerts across two continents. The European leg ran in late spring: Culturgest in Lisbon on 29 May, Theatro Circo in Braga on 31 May with a 19:00 start, then two nights at Bozar in Brussels — Wiltzie's home city — on 4 and 5 June.

The North American leg in September was the headline, because it was the first time the project had played the continent in a decade. It opened at the Vic Theatre in Chicago on 23 September, an all-ages show promoted by Jam with doors at 18:30 and music at 19:30, moved to The Concert Hall in Toronto on 25 September and Théâtre Rialto in Montréal on 26 September as part of POP Montréal, and finished with a two-night stand in the Main Hall at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn on 28 and 29 September, doors at seven and an eight o'clock start. Pan•American, Mark Nelson's project, opened the North American dates; Nelson released a new album, Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane, in April 2026.

Nothing is currently on sale beyond that run, and no 2027 dates have been listed.

What the set actually consists of

The Brussels show on 4 June gives the clearest picture of the 2026 programme, and it is not a greatest-hits shuffle. Sixteen pieces, no encore listed, running in a deliberate arc: two openers, then a long sequence lifted whole out of Atomos — the second, third, sixth, seventh, eighth and tenth movements played in order, which is close to half the show in a single block — before the set turns to The Undivided Five for 'The Haunted Victorian Pencil', 'Aqualung, Motherfucker', 'A Minor Fifth Is Made of Phantoms', 'The Rhythm of a Dividing Pair' and 'Retour au Champs de Mars'.

The last two numbers are both from the 2011 debut: 'Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears' and then 'We Played Some Open Chords and Rejoiced, for the Earth Had Circled the Sun Yet Another Year'. Fifteen years on, the project still finishes where it started. The notable absence is Invisible Cities, which contributes almost nothing to the programme despite being the most recent record — unsurprising for a score written to sit under ninety minutes of projected video.