Andy Stott
Born in Oldham, Andy Stott has worked and lived in Manchester all his life. Too young to have experienced rave culture first-hand, he was nonetheless a voracious listener…
Born in Oldham, Andy Stott has worked and lived in Manchester all his life. Too young to have experienced rave culture first-hand, he was nonetheless a voracious listener from an early age, and in school started playing keyboards, mimicking the sounds he heard on hardcore mixtapes.
In his early teens, at the suggestion of his piano teacher (and later collaborator) Alison Skidmore, Stott started to pursue sound design and production, first using software, then gradually building his own studio. He got introduced to the Modern Love label via his schoolmate’s older brother Mark Stewart, aka Claro Intelecto, and has been releasing exclusively on the label ever since. His first 12″, the Replace EP (2005) was followed a year later by a debut album Merciless – heavily indebted to emotive and angular Detroit and Berlin House and Techno.
By the end of that decade, Stott started to forge a distinct new path, incorporating elements of hardcore, jungle, post-punk, and dreampop into increasingly unique productions, with influences ranging from A Guy Called Gerald to Prefab Sprout, YMO to Prince, Depeche Mode to Terror Danjah. On 2011’s acclaimed duo of EP’s Passed Me By and We Stay Together, he took a sharp left turn into what eventually got labelled “Knackered House” by the UK music press – the tempo and subs pushed ever-lower, the sounds indelibly screwed.
That creative breakthrough ignited a spark that led to his first landmark album Luxury Problems (2012) and its followup Faith In Strangers (2014) – records that added vocals to an already unique matrix, garnering considerable critical acclaim and casting influence on new generations of listeners and producers over a decade later. 2016’s Too Many Voices drilled Eski Grime through a 4th world fantasy, 2019’s It Should Be Us dialled down the tempo and reduced the bitrate to rubble, and 2021’s Never The Right Time took that dreampop blueprint to a more brooding dimension. In amongst all of that, he’s remixed music by Panda Bear, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Holy Other, Vladislav Delay, Tricky and Martin Gore, and played in dozens of countries around the globe.
Always pushing himself into the unknown, October 2026 sees the release of Andy’s first new material in 5 years, a new album Late Loop featuring the most bare-boned and fully realised material of his career, with vocals from longtime spar Alison Skidmore and, for the first time, acclaimed singer-songwriter Elaine Howley.
His live shows follow their own distinct trajectory, veering from propulsive club jams to dubbed and weirder soundsystem sessions, at other times taking it deep into the night with smoke and atmosphere