Ben Böhmer returns to Ninja Tune with Faithless

Ben Böhmer’s new single reads as a break from the sound that has carried his career — house and techno, melodic at heart. The production is built from halftime percussion set under swelling, atmospheric pads, with a vocal that ends up carrying most of the weight. Faithless is out now via Ninja Tune. It features Erin LeCount and gathers the singles he put out earlier this year — Rust, Hiding and Best Life — alongside one further new track, One Last Call, into a five-song set.

Böhmer has been releasing music since 2014, and Faithless is not his first outing on this label: he arrived at Ninja Tune in 2023 with Rust, the track that now sits folded into the new set as one of its five songs.

The record’s other collaborators tell as much about the year as the title track does. Hiding pairs him with Lykke Li, Best Life carries a feature from Jonah, a collaborator he returns to often, and One Last Call closes the set with Felix Raphael. Rust is the one track here with no featured name, and it is the song that first brought him to the label. No name repeats across the five. LeCount, who writes and produces as well as sings, brings a reputation of her own for lyrics that lean plaintive and a voice that stays wide-eyed and bright, and it is her presence, more than anything else on the tracklist, that makes Faithless the outlier here.

The five tracks arrive on a catalogue that, across a decade of releasing, has now crossed close to a billion streams.