GRRL

Library CDs, racing games and a bedroom in Durham

Mapley-Brittle has lived in Durham, North Carolina for his entire life. Speaking to Psychic Hotline in November 2022, he described himself as self-taught and roughly seven years into making electronic music, which puts the start of the project around 2015. The way in was not a record shop or a club night but the CD shelves of a public library, where he found Björk, Radiohead and M.I.A. alongside the soundtracks to Wipeout, SSX and Ape Escape — game music commissioned to sit underneath motion rather than in front of an audience. That lineage is audible in the records, which are built to propel something rather than to be admired.

NTS picked him up early. A monthly slot on the London station has run since 2015, and by April 2026 the show had passed 131 episodes. A decade of regular selections amounts to a public log of his listening, and it is the radio work rather than any single release that carried the name out of North Carolina. Herb Sundays, writing in April 2026, credited that encyclopedic range — music, fashion, film, games, hardware — with drawing attention from A.G. Cook, Anamanaguchi, Porter Robinson and Skrillex. He has since shared bills with the first three.

Pay Attention, and the two-hour Marathon

The debut album Pay Attention arrived in 2019. Its follow-up, Marathon, landed in mid-2020 and ran to almost two hours, a length that functioned less as a statement about stamina than as an admission that he writes faster than most labels can schedule.

Asked by PAPER in July 2020 what fed into it, he answered with a reading list rather than a mood: Dopplereffekt, Jeff Mills, Luke Slater, Claude Young, James Ruskin, LFO, Ken Ishii, T++, 808 State, Shinichi Atobe, Kraftwerk, Suzanne Ciani and Aphex Twin, plus the catalogues of Warp, Sähkö, Djax-Up-Beats, Peacefrog and Metroplex. Basic Channel's BCD II came up as the single most important record. The non-musical half of the answer was just as specific — Alien, The Thing, Event Horizon and 2001 on the film side; System Shock 2, Alien Isolation and Doom 64 on the game side; and then sneaker design, Roger Dean's artwork for Psygnosis and the typography of old digital watches. It reads like a designer's reference wall, which is roughly how the music is assembled.

The Nick Sanborn collaboration

The partnership that raised his profile locally began because two Durham producers kept turning up at the same parties. Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso, who records solo as Made of Oak, works in a different register, and Pioneer Works described the pair as having spent years playing dissimilar strains of electronic music in the same rooms before deciding to make something together. Their first billed appearance as GRRL x Made of Oak was a sold-out DJ night in the Pioneer Works garden in Brooklyn on 27 July 2022, running from 7pm to 11pm as part of a Sylvan Esso curation.

The EP Inertia followed in September 2022 on Psychic Hotline, the label Sylvan Esso run, with visual and audio-visual work by Aaron Anderson and Eric Timothy Carlson. Mapley-Brittle was direct about why the collaboration worked: having another person's perspective, he told the label, removed much of the indecision and second-guessing involved in making things — a notable comment from someone whose solo output tends to arrive in bulk.

Operator and the refusal to warm up

Operator, released on Jubilee's Magic City label in spring 2023, tightened the focus onto the dancefloor. Crack Magazine invited him to record Crack Mix 497 that April, and his own description of the brief was unambiguous: heavy, textured, rhythmic club music, some techno, some electro, all of it new, and absolutely the kind of set he would play in a club. The mix skipped the customary warm-up and opened at peak-time intensity, which remains the house style.

That consistency between the mixes and the records matters more than it might for other producers. Three years later, introducing his FADER Mix, he used almost the same formulation — that this was exactly the kind of material he would play out. The radio shows, the guest mixes and the club sets are not separate disciplines so much as the same selection process running at different lengths.

Beetle: twenty-four tracks on PC Music

Stereogum announced the album on 26 February 2026, trailing it with two tracks: Moire, which it described as having iridescent buzzing and commanding claps, and Scatter, which it likened to a bouncy ball having a tantrum. Beetle itself followed on 13 March 2026 as the first GRRL release on PC Music, catalogued PCMGRRL1 and running to 24 tracks — Moire, Chlorophyll Light Reactor, Camber, Twist, Indigo (Sierra), Talk Talk, Daisy, Leafhopper, Rhino, Binary, Amber, Fold, You Can't, Scatter, Butterfly, Clatter, Tumble, Rattlesnake, X-Metal, Mosquito, Honeybee, Hard Shell, Firefly and Beetle (Wildlife Hypercolor). Robin Schmidt mastered it; Jonathan Zawada supplied the artwork. There is no accompanying concept statement anywhere on the release page, which is characteristic.

Six days after release, on 19 March 2026, he recorded an hour-long FADER Mix that pulled in baile funk, tech house and three tracks from Beetle. The interview around it produced the closest thing he has given to a mission statement — that he has been obsessed with music literally forever, to an annoying degree probably, and that what he wants is to hear exciting and insane new sounds as loud as possible. Asked what he would rather see less of, he named the gassing up of thoroughly mediocre music. Elsewhere in the same conversation he listed Björk, Autechre, Nine Inch Nails, Kate Bush, Pan Sonic and Jeff Mills as the artists he keeps returning to.

Reaction to Beetle has come mostly from buyers rather than critics: supporters on the release page praised the production and the vinyl pressing, with more than one calling it a contender for their album of the year. No major publication appears to have reviewed it at length, which is a recurring feature of a career built on radio and bandcamp rather than campaign cycles.

Standing in October 2026

Seven months after Beetle, the live calendar is deliberately narrow — a pair of dates on sale rather than a tour — and the nearest of them is on home ground. Good Moon, the Durham festival anchored by Sylvan Esso, runs from 8 to 10 October 2026 at the Durham Performing Arts Center on the American Tobacco Campus, with gates at 5pm each day, Sylvan Esso headlining Thursday and Saturday and Tyler Childers taking Friday. Day tickets run from $49.50 to $89.50, with a VIP weekend pass at $427.50.

The festival's late-night programme moves to The Pinhook, Bay 7 and BOOM Club, the 600 Foster Street venue that handles the electronic bookings. GRRL x Made of Oak have the Friday aftershow, billed as Good Moon / No Visa Aftershow Night 2, the middle of three nights that also feature Jacques Greene and Armana Khan. Pairing a PC Music album artist with the festival headliner's solo alias on a club bill rather than the main stage is a fair summary of where the project sits: well connected, locally embedded, and still more at home at half past eleven in a converted warehouse than in front of a seated theatre.