Sylvan Esso

A remix in Milwaukee

The duo began with a favour. Meath was touring as one third of the a cappella trio Mountain Man; Sanborn was playing bass in Megafaun and releasing electronic music alone as Made of Oak. They met at the Cactus Club in Milwaukee, stayed in touch, and Meath asked him to rework a song of hers called "Play It Right". What came back was not a remix so much as a different band, and the two of them took the name Sylvan Esso from a character in the iOS game Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP.

They settled in Durham, North Carolina, and married in June 2016. The division of labour has held since: Meath writes and sings, Sanborn builds the machine underneath. In a September 2026 interview Meath described the studio dynamic as a kind of silent performance — Sanborn will try something, say nothing, and watch her face. Sanborn, for his part, said he was grateful for the honesty of her verdicts, joking about the "crushing disappointment" when an idea fails.

The records

The self-titled debut arrived on 12 May 2014 via Partisan and reached number 39 on the Billboard 200. "Hey Mami" was the calling card; "Coffee" was the one that went gold with the RIAA and put them on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that July. What Now followed in 2017 on Loma Vista, peaked at number 32, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Dance/Electronic Album.

Then came the detours. The 2019 WITH tour expanded the two-person rig into a full ensemble that included Meg Duffy, Molly Sarlé and Jenn Wasner; a film of the Durham performance premiered on YouTube in April 2020, with the live album close behind. Free Love, also 2020, reached number 100. No Rules Sandy in 2022 was quicker and rougher, and was the first Sylvan Esso record to come out on their own imprint rather than someone else's.

Running their own shop

Psychic Hotline is the part of the operation that does not get billed on the marquee. The label handles their releases and those of friends and labelmates, much of it recorded at Betty, the duo's studio in Chapel Hill. Sanborn has described the wider project — label, studio, festival — as an experiment in whether a deliberately small-scale vision can survive the current market.

The festival is Good Moon, first staged across 31 May and 1 June 2024 at Durham Bulls Athletic Park. Meath said at the time that they had been reaching towards something like it for the entire life of the band, and Sanborn was openly anxious about the thing feeling like a party for the city rather than only for the people inside the fence. It runs biennially; the second edition lands this October.

In September 2025 they pulled their catalogue from Spotify over its chief executive's investment in AI military technology — an unusual move for an act whose streaming numbers had been a meaningful part of its reach.

Ow ∞

The fifth album, Ow ∞, came out on 11 September 2026 on Psychic Hotline: twelve tracks, written and produced by Meath and Sanborn, four years in the making at Betty with additional sessions in Los Angeles. The personnel list is the widest of their career — six different drummers, plus Glenn Kotche, BJ Burton, Jenn Wasner, Daniel Aged, Matt Douglas, Jake Luppen, Buddy Ross and Joe Westerlund across guitar, bass, keys, vibraphone and woodwinds. "Concrete Glen", which carries a Sigur Rós sample, arrived in July 2026; "Hot Slob" followed.

The record was made through a genuinely bad run. Jessica, a close friend and former Brooklyn flatmate of Meath's, died of liver failure in 2023. Hurricane Helene tore through North Carolina in September 2024. The couple then relocated to California and were evacuated by the January 2025 wildfires. The title is the point: an infinity sign after a yelp, pain and delight looping into each other. "If you're participating in the world, the thing that you're agreeing to is potential pain," Sanborn said. Meath's counter-argument is that refusing both halves leaves a person closed, and not really living.

Paste's review by Grace Robins-Somerville called the album counterintuitively immediate and unpolished, and let it stand as a grief record that declines to resolve — singling out "Flood Season" and "Sledge" for weight, "Right to Left" for its understatement, "Jessica" for its restraint, and the unfinished feel of the closer, "Plastic Sword". Meath's stated method helps explain the texture: come up with an idea, then remove a third of it.

September 2026: where they are

The rollout has been idiosyncratic rather than expensive. Between 28 August and 9 September the pair ran a record-shop road trip through Philadelphia, Washington DC, Brooklyn, Asheville and Durham. On 3 September they staged free, all-ages hi-fi listening parties in more than fifteen cities at once — Mexico City, Taipei, Tokyo, London, Berlin, Chicago, Austin, Portland and others — with no RSVP and nothing to buy; the same night they played a late set at Elsewhere in Brooklyn that ran past two in the morning. On 12 September they appeared at Blossoms & Bones at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiú, New Mexico.

In-store appearances at Resident in Brighton and Rough Trade East in London are booked for 20 and 21 September, with a further London date on the 24th, before the touring proper begins.

The autumn run

Forty dates are currently on sale. The headline tour opens at The Eastern in Atlanta on 1 October and works east and north through two nights at The Orange Peel in Asheville, two at the 9:30 Club in Washington DC, Franklin Music Hall in Philadelphia on the 12th, Brooklyn Paramount on the 14th, House of Blues in Boston on the 17th, History in Toronto on the 19th, The Salt Shed in Chicago on the 22nd and two nights at First Avenue in Minneapolis.

In the middle of it sits Good Moon, 8–10 October, across four Durham venues with Tyler Childers, Meshell Ndegeocello, MJ Lenderman, Rodrigo Amarante, Silvana Estrada and Jacques Greene; Sylvan Esso's own festival set at the Durham Performing Arts Center falls on the 10th. Festival de Frue in Kakegawa, Japan follows at the end of the month. The West Coast and Southwest legs — Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, Oakland, The Wiltern in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Denver — run February and March 2027, with Southern dates after them and Big Ears in Knoxville in April 2027.