Thelonious, returns with an album that gathers many of the elements that have defined the project over the years while simultaneously pushing them apart. The record feels like a tightening of earlier ideas: interlocking melodies, hypnotic patterns, a sustained focus on rhythm and texture, paired with a sound that is rougher, drier and more immediate than before.

Musically, Grumpy Pieces draws from familiar territory within the Harmonious Thelonious universe: Pan-African and Middle Eastern rhythmic concepts, repetitive minimal structures, stripped-down electronics and noise used as a structural force. Yet everything here feels less fixed, more unstable, at times close to falling apart.

Melodies grind against rugged bass foundations; dry snare hits cut sharply through the mix. The groove remains central, but now carries a nervous, fractured quality noticeably more restless than one might expect from a project active for nearly eighteen years.

The title Grumpy Pieces is more than a wry aside. The album reflects a present shaped by political and social tension. Anger, uncertainty and a muted sense of despair run through the tracks, without the music ever becoming literal or lapsing into overt commentary. Instead, it operates through friction: between dancefloor momentum and disruption, immediacy and resistance.

While the A-side opens in a comparatively direct and driving manner with And You May Find Yourself, the B-side increasingly embraces disintegration as a guiding principle, culminating in the aptly titled closing track Dissolving.

The album was once again produced in Schwander's home base of Düsseldorf, using a working method rooted firmly in the moment. The tracks were not arranged on a screen, but developed intuitively, recorded, abandoned and reshaped.

This approach also connects directly to the live practice of Harmonious Thelonious: music understood as a repetitive state, a trance-like space that insists rather than narrates.

Limitation, intuition and spontaneity are not stylistic gestures here, but essential conditions of the music itself. Influences from everyday listening from Brazilian music and electronic records to film soundtracks - remain deliberately submerged, fully absorbed into a self-contained sonic world.

Grumpy Pieces is not a break, but a sharpening. An album that further condenses and roughens the unmistakable sound of Harmonious Thelonious, offering an uneasy yet physical soundtrack to the current social climate. Dance music with teeth. — Daniel Jahn, 2026

1. And You May Find Yourself
2. Tzing
3. Flip The Script (Dispair)
4. Tropical + Electronical
5. Beacon
6. Made In Italy
7. Les Belles Vacances
8. Dissolving