Tinlicker

A solo project that kept acquiring people

Tinlicker began in 2012 as a solo outlet for Micha Heyboer, born in Utrecht on 14 May 1979, working through his own Zero Three Zero label. It was not an overnight concern. Two years passed before Jordi van Achthoven, born in Gouda on 4 June 1983, came in through a mutual contact and the project settled into a duo, which is how most listeners came to know it.

The early run of records went out on Zero Three Zero and on Sotto Voce, the label run by Feed Me, and the pair built an audience the slow way. The track that did the most to move things along was "Oudegracht", named for the canal that runs through their home city, and which found an audience online well ahead of any label push.

The name they gave their Utrecht club nights, Remember The Future, has outlasted the nights themselves. It is now the imprint that carries their records, in partnership with [PIAS] — a detail that says something about how deliberately the pair have held on to the parts of the operation they built themselves.

The Anjunadeep years

Signing to Anjunadeep in 2017 gave the duo a distribution route into the melodic house audience that had been forming around that label, and they became one of its more recognisable acts. The debut album, This Is Not Our Universe, followed in 2019, topped dance charts in several countries and put their name in front of people who had never heard a Tinlicker twelve-inch. Its credits ran to guest vocalists and a collaboration with alt-J, which was an unusual booking for a record of that kind at the time.

A second album, In Another Lifetime, arrived in February 2022. By then the pair were regulars on the festival circuit — Coachella, Tomorrowland and Ultra among them — and the live question was starting to press. The records were built from long melodic arcs and arrangements with more moving parts than a DJ set comfortably carries, and the gap between what they made in the studio and what they did on stage was widening.

Moving to PIAS, and making a record that sounded like a band

In 2023 they announced a move to PIAS Électronique. The first album under that arrangement, Cold Enough For Snow, came out in February 2024 and leaned harder into song structure and guest voices; Brian Molko of Placebo appears on it, which is not a name that turns up on melodic house records by accident.

The direction of travel was clear enough. Each record had more singing on it than the last, and more of the arrangement was being written rather than programmed. What had not yet changed was the shape of the act itself: two producers, a laptop, a stage.

Hero Baldwin joins, and the maths changes

Hero Baldwin, a singer and producer based in London, came out of punk and hardcore circles in Brighton before moving into electronic music through collaboration. She first appeared on a Tinlicker release with "I Started A Fire" in April 2025, then on stage with them at Melkweg in Amsterdam that July and at Tinlicker In The Park at Crystal Palace Bowl in August — the largest headline show the act had played to that point.

In October 2025 she joined as a full member. The announcement came alongside the single "I Want My Freedom", built on piano and breakbeat percussion and written by all three, and it was framed less as a guest promotion than as a change in what Tinlicker is. Baldwin has described her lyrics as starting life as something closer to diary entries than song drafts — "most of my songs begin as mini essays, almost like abstract diary entries" — and said the words to "I Want My Freedom" came from a sense of disconnection as a woman in her mid-twenties watching the world move backwards.

The working method she describes is two-directional: Heyboer and van Achthoven build a landscape and she writes into it, or she brings a vocal and they build around that. On record the difference is audible in the pacing, which is slower to resolve than on previous Tinlicker albums.

Dreams Of The Machine

The fourth album came out on 27 February 2026 through Remember The Future and [PIAS]. It runs to fourteen tracks plus a rework of "I Want My Freedom", and moves from "Awake Conciousness" through "Melancholia", "Dancing In The Dark", "God In You", "Choosing Life", "Mothership", "Spirit Of Time" and "Glow" to a closing "Reborn".

The subject is technology, handled as an inversion rather than a warning: the group have described it as a metaphor for computers or AI having human dreams and emotions while people behave more like machines. "Choosing Life", the focus track, sits Baldwin's vocal over breakbeat percussion and low end, and is the clearest statement of the album's argument.

Reviewers have picked up on its patience. For a record about automation and speed, it lingers on melody, leaves space around the vocals and builds tension towards reflection as often as towards release. The reading is that it remains recognisably Tinlicker — danceable and closely produced — while behaving more like a band album than the three that came before it.

Where they are in September 2026

The trio played a full EU and UK tour in spring 2026, which was the first proper test of the new format. It took in AFAS Live in Amsterdam on 13 March, Exhibition in London on 21 March with Helsloot in support, Sentralen in Oslo and Hamburger Börs in Stockholm on consecutive nights at the end of March, plus Manchester's Albert Hall, Berlin's Astra, Paris, and first visits to Brussels, Oslo and Stockholm.

A summer of festivals followed — Ancienne Belgique in Brussels on 19 June, then Hurricane at Scheeßel on 20 June and Southside at Neuhausen ob Eck the following night, and Pergola in Wrocław on 27 June. Songkick counts 48 scheduled performances across 2026.

On 22 April the group announced 21 North American dates, their first full run there as a live trio rather than as DJs. Tickets went to presale on 30 April and general sale on 1 May. The run opens tonight, 16 September, at House of Blues in Chicago and closes on 17 October at Showbox SoDo in Seattle, taking in Saint Andrew's Hall in Detroit, two nights at History in Toronto, the 9:30 Club in Washington, MTELUS in Montreal, Roadrunner in Boston, Brooklyn Paramount in New York, Emo's in Austin, the Fillmore Auditorium in Denver, The Van Buren in Phoenix, The Wiltern in Los Angeles, The Midway in San Francisco and Vancouver's Vogue Theatre. "We're incredibly grateful for all the positive reactions to our new album," the group said when the dates went up.