PREMIERE: Exos – North Of January (Mutual Rytm)
Exos has never treated techno as a fixed language. For more than two decades, the Icelandic artist has used it as a living system, shaped by environment, memory, and physical place.
Sweet Dreams, his fifth full length album and first LP for SHDW’s Mutual Rytm, is not a return or a reinvention. It is a consolidation. Past, present, and future collapse into a single body of work that carries the weight of lived experience rather than scene cycles.
Born and raised in Iceland, Exos has always worked in extremes. Light and darkness. Heat and isolation. Motion and stillness. Those contrasts have defined his output across labels like Tresor, X/OZ, and Mutual Rytm, and they remain central here. Whether operating in dubby restraint or driving, high impact techno, his sound has consistently carried the discipline and directness of 90s techno without slipping into nostalgia. Sweet Dreams does not reference the past. It absorbs it.
The album opens with its most intimate moment. An analogue ambient introduction created 28 years ago in collaboration with his father, recorded during shared studio sessions at D17 in Reykjavik. The Nord Modular tones feel suspended in time, less like an opening track and more like a doorway. From there, the title track emerges with a linear, hypnotic pull. Cold synth modulations shimmer against a steady forward motion, setting the emotional temperature for what follows.
As the album unfolds, Exos moves freely across the full spectrum of his sound. Out premiere, North of January captures the physical cold of his homeland in tone and restraint.
Sweet Dreams is not structured as a peak time statement. It is a long form narrative that moves through memory, geography, and personal history with control and clarity. The bonus digital tracks extend that language into minimal, deep techno, and ambient tension without diluting the core intent.
After years of releases on Mutual Rytm and beyond, this album feels less like a milestone and more like a document. A record shaped by decades spent inside Iceland’s unique conditions, filtered through a producer who has never chased relevance, only truth.
Sweet Dreams is released on Mutual Rytm on December 19, 2025.
