Some bands are easy to sum up. Ramsey Elkholy’s Monotronic isn’t one of them. The catalog moves between indie rock, electronic pop, and songs built on gongs and Southeast Asian percussion, often within the same album, and that range is a big part of the appeal. The best approach is to treat it like a tasting menu: one course at a time, starting with the newest dish. That’s “You Don’t Care,” out October 2.
Who’s behind it
Elkholy is a guitarist, songwriter, and producer with New York roots, and he oversees the band’s videos as closely as its records. He founded Monotronic in 2016 as a collective rather than a fixed lineup, an idea that goes back to the years he spent studying Indian music in Calcutta and living with the Orang Rimba in the rainforests of Sumatra. There, the group came before the individual, and that’s how the band still works.
The players who’ve passed through Monotronic bring serious pedigrees. Musicians who’ve worked with David Bowie, Joe Jackson, and Daft Punk have been part of the band, and Omar Hakim played drums across the band’s latest album.
Elkholy recently moved to Los Angeles. The band is coming off a successful fall tour, and he’s now focused on the next album.
Start here: “You Don’t Care”
The new single has an unusual backstory. Elkholy wrote the lyrics on the beach in Tulum, a place he’s been escaping to for years, and the song was originally meant for Waiting for You. It didn’t make the cut. Its mood pulled away from the other tracks, so he held it for two years and gave it a release of its own.
Lyrically, it’s a breakup song about a man who realizes the person he’s with has already checked out. The video takes that idea somewhere stranger. Inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina, it follows a female android and the man who built her, so the question at the heart of the song lands differently: maybe she was never capable of caring in the first place.
Next: “Sun Song”
To hear where the album came from, go to “Sun Song.” It started as a guitar riff Elkholy played on his sofa for months, with no lyrics and no plan. It finally turned into a song one morning on the way to a session.
“I played the riff, and out came, ‘I don’t want to lose a minute of sleep, lying in bed and wondering what could have been,'” Elkholy says. “At that point, I knew I had a concept, and the song kind of took off from there.”
The band tracked most of the instrumental that same day, and the lyrics were finished about a week later. One line from the outro, “waiting for you,” ended up naming the entire record.
The real test: “Looking Away”
If one song decides whether Monotronic is for you, it’s “Looking Away,” the album’s opening track. Think shades of Phoenix, but with more driving guitars. Listeners have clearly found it: the song recently passed 1 million streams on Spotify.
On the side: the videos
Monotronic’s videos are worth a course of their own. “Kids of Summer” stars Snookie, Elkholy’s French bulldog, riding a skateboard. “Buy Yourself a Dream” was directed by Ben Kadie, who has made videos for Vulfpeck and Cory Wong, and it’s a surreal watch that rewards a second viewing. Both singles earned radio airplay, and both videos premiered at No. 1 on VEVO’s Incoming Indie playlist.
Then there’s “Kettle Song (Yama Yama),” the most openly global track in the catalog. For the video, the band rented the eight-foot gong from the most recent Godzilla film and brought in K-pop dancers.
Go deeper: Waiting for You
The full album, released earlier this year, runs 11 tracks and is already approaching 4 million streams in a little over six months. Heard in order, it makes sense of everything above: a decade of songs from a collective that keeps changing shape, and a new single that couldn’t fit on the album because it was already pointing somewhere else.
“You Don’t Care” is out October 2. Read more about Ramsey Elkholy at ramseyelkholyny.com and ramsey-elkholy.com, and follow Monotronic on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
