Post-rock lifers, this one’s for you. El Ten Eleven are back — properly back — with a brand new album, a fresh single, and their first tour in four long years. And somehow, they sound both reflective and restless as hell.
The beloved instrumental duo have announced ‘Nowhere Faster,’ their 11th full-length album (and 16th release overall), arriving April 10th on Joyful Noise Recordings. Alongside the news comes Uncanny Valley Girl, a lead single that immediately signals something old, something new, and something slightly unsettling — in the best possible way.
Even longtime fans will feel a little jolt of recognition here. Right from the opening seconds, Kristian Dunn resurrects a long-retired companion: the delay pedal. After nearly 20 years in sonic exile, it’s back — smearing basslines into cascading echoes, blurring the line between rhythm, melody, and atmosphere.
“The title is a jokey nod to the way AI seems to be taking over,” Dunn explains. “On this track we’ve got a real string section (no AI strings!) and piano in addition to my usual crazy bass sounds that don’t sound like bass. I also started using a delay pedal again on this record after a years-long absence — you can really hear it right at the beginning.”
It’s a fitting reintroduction, because ‘Nowhere Faster’ is an album obsessed with motion — not progress, exactly, but velocity. That strange modern compulsion to keep moving even when the destination is unclear, or maybe nonexistent.
Speed, stillness, and the anxiety in between
Life, as El Ten Eleven frame it here, doesn’t follow neat arcs. It piles up. It accelerates. It confuses motion for meaning. Sometimes the only escape is inward — a nowhere space of your own making.
Forged during the band’s longest break from touring and recording in their 23-year history, ‘Nowhere Faster’ sits squarely in that unease. Across eight tracks and 33 minutes, the album asks the quiet, uncomfortable questions: What are we running from? And what do we think we can outrun?
That tension seeps into every layer of the record, including the artwork. Created once again with longtime collaborator Rob Fleming, the cover depicts a classic liminal space — familiar yet anonymous, softly lit but faintly disorienting. A stained-glass-colored building and a streetlamp blur at the edges, suggesting motion that feels less like freedom and more like enclosure.
New textures, bigger risks
Despite the pause in touring, Dunn never slowed creatively — and he didn’t make things easy for drummer Tim Fogarty either. ‘Nowhere Faster’ was written with not one but two drummers in mind, pushing Fogarty into some of the most demanding performances of his career.
For the first time, El Ten Eleven also weave real strings and piano throughout the album, expanding an already dense and layered sonic palette. The record is split emotionally and sonically: the first half leans on electric bass, while the back half shifts to acoustic bass processed through pedals, subtly changing the weight and feel of the music.
Tracks pull from moments scattered across the band’s long history. Bjork’s Alarm Clock takes its name from an insult hurled at them by a punk guitarist on their very first tour — a memory now transformed into something buoyant and slyly joyful, complete with bow-scratched strings and a sense of private laughter between bandmates.
Last Night In The Kitchen veers into unexpected territory, channeling the slick, sleazy drama of classic Bond themes, while album closer So It Goes draws inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Built around one of Dunn’s stranger experiments — a capo wrapped around a fretless acoustic bass — it unfolds into a twangy, americana-tinged meditation on aging, loss, and survival.
A reckoning, not a farewell
‘Nowhere Faster’ isn’t nostalgia. It’s not a victory lap. It’s a reckoning — with time, endurance, and the uncomfortable question of how long anything can last. Bands. Bodies. Lives.
We’re all moving toward something. The only real choice is the soundtrack we take with us.
If nothing else, it might sound a lot like Nowhere Faster.
‘Nowhere Faster’ track list
Out April 10, 2026 via Joyful Noise Recordings
- Uncanny Valley Girl
- Björk’s Alarm Clock
- Awhile Ago, Alone
- Last Night In The Kitchen
- Nowhere Faster
- You Against You
- Formerly Fresh
- So It Goes
Pre-order / pre-save ‘Nowhere Faster’ here
West Coast Tour Dates (First tour in four years)
- Apr 23 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo
- Apr 24 – Felton, CA @ Felton
- Apr 25 – San Francisco, CA @ Bottom of the Hill
- Apr 26 – Sacramento, CA @ Starlet Room
- Apr 29 – Seattle, WA @ Hidden Hall
- Apr 30 – Portland, OR @ Soundscape NW
- May 1 – Bend, OR @ Volcanic Theatre Pub
- May 2 – Boise, ID @ Neurolux
- May 3 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge
- May 6 – Denver, CO @ Globe
- May 8 – Phoenix, AZ @ Rebel Lounge
- May 9 – San Diego, CA @ Casbah
Tickets are on sale now. Don’t blink — they’ve been gone a while, and they’re moving fast again.
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