Editors' Notes
Schoolfriends (and former sound engineers) Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker began their recording career as remixers—specifically, with a reworked version of Radiohead’s “Climbing Up The Walls”—and there is a fitting tension between the human and the electronic, the earthy and the synthesised, running like a thread through their output as Zero 7. Much of this can be credited to the singers Binns and Hardaker have wrangled since spellbinding 2001 debut Simple Things: a rolling repertory of characterful, charismatic performers that tend to imbue those signature, sumptuous dreamscapes with messiness and human fallibility, turning them into gently psychedelic 1960s paeans (José Gonzalez collaboration “Futures”) or lustful, drifting lullabies (“Destiny” with Sophie Barker and serial collaborator Sia Furler). Pleasingly, 2019 release “Mono” proves that, almost two decades down the line, they can still conjure the same pulsing, dawn-lit magic.
