Today, Edinburgh electronic-indie group redolent return, sharing single ‘ok wow’, the first new music since their 2024 Scottish Album of the Year winning debut album dinny greet. Building a gradual crescendo throughout the track, ‘ok wow’ begins with an emotive spectral piano loop underlying frontman Robin Herbert’s vulnerable reflections on an argument gone too far, delivered with a delicate Scottish lilt. Speaking on the single, Robin shares:
“‘ok wow’ is about going too far in a scrap with someone and being sat alone in silence with your wrongness in the aftermath”.
While the track’s textures move up and down throughout, the single’s DNA as an electronic track truly reveals itself halfway through, with drum machine breakbeats, moaning tuned feedback and bassy hits kicking in.
redolent’s story is far from a conventional one. Formed in 2012, the band spent close to a decade writing and hoarding songs before the world caught up with them. Robin, the band’s songwriter and driving force, had by that point given up almost everything else to focus on the group, selling off most of what he owned and researching ways to make money on online forums to fund a slow and uncertain living for himself and the band. It was through this that he became one of the people who found financial success in the GameStop short squeeze of early 2021, a strange and unlikely turn that helped keep the band afloat.
That same year, the band’s aptly named EP, Make Big Money Fast Online Now, brought them to the attention of major labels, leading to a deal with Columbia Records. The partnership ultimately came to an end, but the experience gave the band a renewed sense of creative freedom, directly informing the creation of their debut album, dinny greet, which went on to win the 2024 Scottish Album of the Year Award. Alongside ‘ok wow’, redolent have unveiled a self-produced feature-length documentary charting that extraordinary journey. Described by the band as “the strange story of how we signed to the biggest record label in the world, got dropped, and then won Scottish Album of the Year with our debut album dinny greet”, the film was written, shot, directed, edited and soundtracked by the band themselves, alongside producer George Cuthbert, with animation by Joe Langsworthy.
For more information on Redolent please check their instagram, youtube and tiktok.