Locust shares dreamy new single ‘Long Distance Lover’ ft. Neil Halstead & Natasha Morrow

Mark Van Hoen’s long-running project Locust has surfaced with a stunning new single, Long Distance Lover — and it’s the kind of track that makes you stare out a rain-streaked window and feel things. Featuring guitar from Slowdive’s Neil Halstead and vocals from Irish musician Natasha Morrow, it’s a slow-burning, pulsating meditation on desire, longing, and the particular ache of loving someone across a distance.

Layered synths shimmer beneath Morrow’s drawn-out vocals, while Halstead’s guitar is draped through the mix like something half-remembered. It’s intimate and restless in equal measure — very much in the tradition of Van Hoen’s celebrated body of work, which Pitchfork once described as combining “oceanic drone with pop lyricism, using technology as a catalyst.”

An official music video arrives alongside the track, leaning into that emotional well with silhouettes drifting in and out of frame. Watch and listen below.

LISTEN TO ‘LONG DISTANCE LOVER’

Mark Van Hoen on How It Came Together

The song’s origin story is as characteristically unhurried as the track itself. Van Hoen explains:

“The music was recorded back in 2020 originally as a collab between Neil Halstead and I. It sat around for a few years, and I had the idea to send it to Natasha to see if it inspired anything vocally. She came up with the idea of long-distance phone calls between lovers. It struck a chord with me as I had experienced a couple of relationships like that. The idea of repeating these expressions of desire and longing over and over, because you are aching to be together.”

“I had actually never met Natasha, and generally, I find that remote collabs don’t work because there’s a connection missing somehow. But in Natasha’s case, I had several long phone calls with her, and I think we connected that way. Not in any romantic sense, but as musical collaborators, which has its own particular need for a personal connection and understanding. I found it interesting that it related to the song’s lyrics in that she and I established a different kind of personal bond over the phone.”

A Project Very Much Alive

The single arrives on the back of a quietly significant period for Locust. Since September, Van Hoen has been debuting new material in a fresh live configuration featuring musician and NTS Radio DJ Olive Kimoto on lead vocals — the project’s first live outings since they supported Massive Attack in the ’90s. Recent dates have included Perfectly Imperfect’s Elsewhere takeover, And Always Forever Festival, and Flower Moon Festival.

It’s a comeback that’s resonated across generations. Locust’s audiences now span longtime devotees who caught those early Autechre and Aphex Twin co-bills and a younger crowd arriving via the trip-hop revival, social media, and a wave of cloud rap artists who’ve been sampling Van Hoen’s foundational work. That kind of cross-generational cult following is hard-earned and very real.