Pillow Talk begins from an appealingly awkward proposition: what happens when producers fluent in club music stop trying to make the room move quickly? trickpony answer with five tracks where breakbeats sag, voices hover and desire becomes another production effect.
The trio was formed by Australian producers Mike Midnight and Roza Terenzi, old friends working from Perth, with Finnish vocalist and producer Maria Korkeila joining from Helsinki. That distance is audible in the record's construction. Pillow Talk feels assembled rather than performed in a room, with separate textures meeting at their edges: drums, pads, bass pressure and Korkeila's close, breathy vocals.
Released on Terenzi's Berlin label Step Ball Chain in April 2024, the five-track EP sits deliberately outside the faster electronic music surrounding its makers. Its rhythms still understand the dancefloor. Room To Breathe is driven by breaks, but they arrive under layers of atmosphere rather than demanding a peak-time response. The title becomes a production principle: sounds are allowed space around them.
Then there is Shiver, where intimacy and machinery become difficult to separate.
Korkeila's voice gives trickpony their centre of gravity. She does not need to dominate an arrangement; a phrase can sit inside the mix like another synthesised texture, while the production keeps suggesting physical proximity. The accompanying Shiver (On Ice Dub) makes the group's instincts clearer by loosening the song into space, treating the original less as a fixed composition than material that can be stretched and cooled.
Sponsored Ritual and the title track broaden that vocabulary without abandoning its slow pulse. Trip hop is the obvious historical reference, particularly in the combination of heavy breaks, low tempos and vocals recorded for maximum closeness. Yet trickpony are not pretending Bristol in the 1990s never ended. Terenzi and Midnight bring knowledge of contemporary dance music, while Korkeila's own work as emkay moves through house, progressive electronics, breaks and dub-inflected production.
That is why the nostalgia on Pillow Talk feels useful rather than dutiful. Drum & bass can appear as a rhythmic memory; dub becomes a way of organising space; pop arrives through melody and the sensual directness of Korkeila's delivery. The trio use old coordinates while keeping the surface distinctly digital.
By 2026, trickpony have followed the EP with 24/7 Heaven, extending the same interest in slowed club forms. But Pillow Talk remains the cleanest introduction to their logic. Its title promises private conversation, and the music behaves accordingly: close enough to whisper, heavy enough to feel through the wall.
