New York-based collective toso toso announces their self-titled debut, out November 7th, 2025 via Leaving Records. The album delivers an exploratory vision of avant-pop, where free improvisation meets intricate form. Tender and furious, the band navigates extremes of emotion and dynamics—playful and raw—crafting vivid contrasts and surprising turns that emerge seemingly out of nowhere. It’s a bold sketch of sound, where texture becomes narrative and experimentation feels instinctive.

Formed in 2020, toso toso is made up of producer, drummer, and sound designer Kabir Adhiya-Kumar; synth and keyboardist Rahul Carlberg; producer and guitarist Celia Hill; and interdisciplinary artist Isabel Crespo Pardo, the group’s vocalist and wordsmith. Each member brings a background in improvisation, a foundation that shapes their collaborative compositional process. Songs often begin as a single idea from one member, which is then looped, sculpted, and stretched collectively into unexpected forms. These fragments are transformed and sometimes mangled beyond recognition as they pass through the group’s shared sensibility, yielding music that is at once fractured and fluid.

The genre-agnostic sound of toso toso emerges from deep collaboration and a rare kind of creative trust—one rooted in friendship. Drawing from an eclectic palette, the group delights in creating new forms through juxtapositions: punchy synths colliding with existential lyrics, blastbeat drums arising beneath washes of reverb or snap into terse, angular textures. The songs on toso toso walk a tightrope between stillness and cataclysm, balancing emotional intimacy with sonic extremity.

Anchored by striking lyrics and soaring choruses, the lead single, “lluvia de meteoritos” evokes a meteor shower—grand, luminous, and celestial. Combining reverberant string samples, a slanted drumbeat, and chords suspended in space, the track is led by isa’s unrelenting vocals. “lluvia de meteoritos” creates its own atmosphere: immersive and immense. As isa sings, “y me encandila / quedo tan cansado / qué hacer con el pasado / caigo como lluvia de meteoritos en la madrugada,” the line between personal memory and planetary event dissolves. The emotional terrain is rendered vast—world-sized song craft.

The album’s second single, “corre que corre,” makes clear the role that unending transformation plays in the band’s ethos: “en la nube, la lluvia sigue su camino / y lo que cobra vida no se detiene y sigue su camino” (“in the cloud, the rain follows its path / and what comes to life doesn’t stop—it follows its path”). The track is explosive and unrelenting, turning itself inside out as it unfolds. With aggressive energy, extended form, and a sense of sheer sonic vastness, its 8-minute trajectory embodies change as both a musical and existential force. Over the course of seven songs, an abstract yet vividly figurative album takes shape. This striking debut is luminous and pointed, introducing a distinctly new territory of music making. With a sound that’s perpetually in flux, toso toso is never static, always becoming.

Isabel crespo pardo - voice
Celia Hill - guitar, electronics
Rahul Carlberg - piano, keyboards, synthesizers
Kabir Adhiya-Kumar - drums, percussion

Sabrina Salamone - Violin on 'te siento cerca'

Recorded by Andres Abenante at Jaybird Studios
Additional recording - Celia Hill
Mixing and digital master - Celia Hill
Vinyl master - Matthewdavid
Additional production on 'lluvia de meteoritos' - Kabir Adhiya-Kumar

Words by Antonio Lenzo
Artwork by Benedict Kupstas