Factual record of Tycho’s first vocal album, its instrumental companion, and the creative arc that connected them.

The Long Road to a Voice

The story of vocals in Tycho does not begin in 2019. It begins more than fifteen years earlier, in a Sacramento recording space where a young Scott Hansen was trying to make a vocal record for the first time.

In 2003 and 2004, Hansen recorded a batch of tracks with collaborator Jason Sewell in Sacramento. The sessions were intended to produce a proper vocal-driven project. But Hansen, still early in his development as a producer, found himself unable to do what he wanted with the material. As he later explained to Tape Op Magazine: “I had all these vocal tracks but wasn’t in the place as a producer where I knew what to even do with them, so I just started taking snippets.” Those snippets became the vocal samples threaded through Sunrise Projector and Past Is Prologue – the chopped, processed, and abstracted human voices that gave those early records their distinctive texture without ever featuring a conventional vocal performance.

From that point forward, Hansen carried the ambition with him. He told Tape Op: “I always was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to focus and practice and get better at producing, and someday I’m going to do a real, true vocal record.’” His early influences – Zero 7, Cinematic Orchestra, Thievery Corporation – were artists who worked with vocals in sophisticated ways, and Hansen’s aspiration was always to operate in that space. But album after album, the timing was not right. According to NBHAP, the Dive album (2011) was originally planned as a vocal record, but the concept did not materialize at that time.

So when Weather arrived in 2019, it was not a sudden departure. It was the fulfillment of something Hansen had been working toward for sixteen years.

Finding Saint Sinner

Hannah Cottrell was born in 1998 in Houston, Texas. She grew up in a musically inclined household – her father played piano, her brothers played guitar – but she was largely self-taught. At thirteen or fourteen, she picked up a guitar and learned through chord books rather than formal instruction, a deliberate choice she later credited with helping her develop her own distinctive style. Her singing developed unexpectedly: she has described herself as formerly being “such a bad singer” that her brother said she was placed at the back of the choir.

A transformative period came when Cottrell spent two years in South Africa, initially committing to one year but extending her stay. During that time, she found her voice as both a singer and a person. She released an EP titled Ranna in 2013 while living abroad. In 2015, she ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a second EP. Her musical influences included Amy Winehouse and James Blake, and her evolving sound incorporated elements she described as “deep, indie, house, electronica” while maintaining acoustic foundations.

Cottrell, performing under the name Saint Sinner, was based in the San Francisco area when her path crossed with Hansen’s. The two were introduced through a mutual friend. Hansen had been searching for the right voice during the early phases of what would become Weather. He had tried working with other collaborators, but as he told NBHAP: “I had tried a few different things with different people but nothing really felt like it was folding into the music the way I had envisioned.”

Then Cottrell walked in. Hansen described the moment to NBHAP with striking certainty: “I was trying a lot of different things during the early phases of ‘Weather’ and then pretty much out of nowhere I met Hannah and I knew during the first minute of recording her I wanted to make the record around her voice.”

There was a twenty-year age gap between the collaborators – a detail noted in the NPR profile but one that proved irrelevant to the creative chemistry. Hansen sent Cottrell at least a dozen instrumentals and asked her to write to some of them. In what Hansen has described as a pivotal moment of confirmation, Cottrell happened to select as her favorites two tracks that were also his favorites. Their first session together produced two finished songs in approximately four hours.

Hansen made a deliberate choice to give Cottrell creative autonomy. As he told Performer Magazine: “I kept thinking that if it was something I interfered with too much it might [be detrimental]. I just wanted to let Hannah do what she does and express herself.” He elaborated to PopMatters: “I wanted to give Hannah total freedom so there was very little in the way of guidance from my side.” Cottrell wrote all of her own lyrics and much of her own melodies, working from little more than the name of an audio file.

The subject matter Cottrell brought to the project was distinctly her own. Her lyrics addressed polyamory, attraction across genders, and the complexities of identity – themes drawn directly from her personal experience. Cottrell identifies as a lesbian and had come out publicly on Facebook, drawing substantial community support. Her songwriting on Weather drew from personal encounters and observations of human connection. On “Pink & Blue,” the colors referenced a man and a woman with whom she was simultaneously romantically entangled – a song about sexual fluidity written from lived experience.

Scott Hansen’s Stated Reasons

Hansen articulated his motivations for bringing vocals to Tycho across numerous interviews in 2019, and his reasoning was remarkably consistent.

To NPR, in the piece titled “Ambience, Vocalized,” he said: “There needed to be a voice and there needed to be some literal human kind of emotion put into the music that wasn’t up for interpretation as much as just these soundscapes. It was something that kind of grounded it more in reality and more into a personal space than before.”

To PopMatters, he was candid about creative necessity: “I just wasn’t feeling instrumental music enough to make another entire album of it.” He added that the decision was not calculated: “I wasn’t really considering that as I was making the record, I just sort of had my head down and was following this path and seeing where it led.”

To Performer Magazine, he framed it as a long-deferred ambition finally reaching its moment: “This is something I’d wanted to do for a long time. I felt like I had chased down those sounds for the better part of 15 years. I haven’t really had that opportunity, that open space, to explore something different.”

To This Song Is Sick, he described wanting “a powerful statement, like ‘this is the current iteration of Tycho.’” Rather than featuring multiple vocalists, he chose a single voice to make the creative shift unmistakable.

During his 2019 Reddit AMA, Hansen noted that his productions had been “missing a certain ineffable (at the time) component,” which turned out to be vocals. The AMA, covered by Dancing Astronaut and Conscious Electronic, revealed a musician who had reached the vocal decision through years of internal creative pressure, not through external market calculation.

Hansen was aware that the decision would not be universally welcomed. He acknowledged to NBHAP: “I don’t want to feel confined by people’s expectations and this is something I’ve always wanted to do.” And he offered something close to empathy for those who might resist the change: “I hope that existing fans can find the connection between this and the previous records but I totally understand that some people see Tycho as this very specific thing.”

The Move from Ghostly International to Mom + Pop / Ninja Tune

Weather arrived on a new label – or rather, a new pair of labels. After more than a decade with Ghostly International, the Ann Arbor-based imprint that had released Past Is Prologue, Dive, Awake, and Epoch, Hansen signed a deal with Mom + Pop Music (US) and Ninja Tune (international) for his next chapter.

The announcement came in April 2019, coinciding with the release of the first single, “Easy.” Mom + Pop welcomed Tycho to their roster with a public blog post. Hansen’s electronic project had last released an album in 2016 with Epoch on Ghostly, and after what was described as an amicable departure, he moved to the new partnership.

Hansen framed the label change as part of the same creative pivot that led to vocals. In announcing Weather, he stated: “After a trilogy of records spent exploring the outer reaches of experience I am focusing inward to reveal a human side to the music.” The trilogy he referenced – Dive, Awake, and Epoch – represented a complete arc on Ghostly, and Hansen indicated that the new creative direction warranted a new home.

Despite the change, Hansen expressed gratitude to Ghostly International, acknowledging that the people there had been there every step of the way to support his vision. The split was presented by both sides as amicable and natural – an artist whose creative direction had evolved to a point where a different kind of label infrastructure made sense.

The Mom + Pop and Ninja Tune partnership gave Hansen a US label known for working with artists at the intersection of independent credibility and commercial reach (Mom + Pop’s roster has included Andrew Bird, Courtney Barnett, and Flume), alongside Ninja Tune’s deep legacy in the international electronic space. The dual-label arrangement handled US and international distribution respectively, a structure that would serve both Weather and its companion album Simulcast.

Weather: The Album (July 12, 2019)

Weather was released on July 12, 2019, via Mom + Pop / Ninja Tune. It was Tycho’s fifth studio album and the first to feature a vocalist. The album runs just under thirty minutes across eight tracks – a compact, deliberate record.

Tracklist

  1. Easy – An instrumental track and the album’s lead single, released in April 2019 alongside the label announcement. Described as warm and bright, with a wordless vocal melody swaying over synths, drum-kit rhythms, and bass guitar, with flourishes of acoustic guitar nestled inside ambient digital noise. Hansen described “Easy” as being about coming to terms with the past and defining a clear vision moving forward. It served as a bridge: the first thing listeners heard from the new era, but still recognizably instrumental Tycho.

  2. Pink & Blue (feat. Saint Sinner) – The second single, released in May 2019. Cottrell’s lyrics address her simultaneous romantic entanglements with a man (“blue”) and a woman (“pink”), making it a song about sexual fluidity drawn from personal experience. This was the track that made the vocal direction explicit to fans and press alike.

  3. Japan (feat. Saint Sinner) – Hansen came up with the title, inspired by a recent visit to the country to see his wife’s relatives. Cottrell wrote the lyrics independently. The Line of Best Fit singled out “Japan” as “a gorgeous, swirling, kaleidoscope of pop-ambience,” calling it evidence of Hansen’s collaborative capabilities.

  4. Into the Woods – An instrumental track that multiple reviewers identified as “classic Tycho.” The Line of Best Fit described it as featuring a “dazzling” breakbeat rhythm with driving bass and bright synthesizers. Across nearly every review, “Into the Woods” was cited as a highlight, the point where Hansen’s instrumental identity reasserted itself most confidently within the album’s vocal framework.

  5. Skate (feat. Saint Sinner) – A vocal track that would later be reimagined as “Outer Sunset” on the companion album Simulcast.

  6. For How Long (feat. Saint Sinner) – Noted by Clash Magazine for grafting more polished electronics onto a dubby bassline, representing a welcome detour in the album’s second half. Its Simulcast counterpart would become “Alright.”

  7. No Stress (feat. Saint Sinner) – The only track on the album written specifically for vocals after Hansen and Cottrell began working together. (All other vocal tracks existed as instrumentals before Cottrell’s involvement.) Over warm, hazy synths, Cottrell’s breathy vocals turn the track into what several critics described as close to a full-on summer anthem. Its central message – that there is no point in getting obsessed by the things you cannot change – resonated as the album’s most pop-forward moment.

  8. Weather – The instrumental closing track shares its name with the album. It bookends the record with “Easy,” creating an instrumental frame around the vocal core. Clash Magazine described it as bringing back the electro-pop intensity and finishing the record strong.

The Album’s Construction

A critical detail about Weather’s construction: with the sole exception of “No Stress,” all of the songs existed as instrumentals before Hannah Cottrell entered the picture. As Hansen told PopMatters: “With the exception of ‘No Stress’, all of the songs existed as instrumentals prior to Hannah coming into the picture.” This means the vocal direction was not a top-down conceptual decision imposed on the songwriting process. Hansen built the instrumental architecture first, then brought in the voice. The album’s structure – instrumental opener, vocal core, instrumental closer – reflected this layered approach.

Hansen described the thematic direction to This Song Is Sick: “I wanted to speak to things that are outside of our control, things we kind of have to accept like dealing with adversity.” The album title itself – Weather – evoked both atmospheric conditions and the verb meaning to endure.

The production approach also changed. Hansen told Performer Magazine that he had renovated his home studio for this record: “Before I would have to go to my engineer’s studio and bring my computer and all of my equipment. Now it’s great, I don’t have to travel anywhere to record.” He worked in Reaper, his DAW of choice, and wanted the record to reconnect with the warmth of his earlier work: “This record was about reconnecting with the positivity and beauty in my early music. I wanted to return to more of the warm, familiar, beautiful sounds.”

The four months Hansen and Cottrell spent in recording sessions produced something that reversed his typical compositional approach. As he told This Song Is Sick, the presence of vocals changed “the way I thought about the structures of the songs” – pushing him to think about song architecture differently than he had across four previous albums of purely instrumental work.

The Grammy Nomination

Weather received a nomination for Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards (the 2020 ceremony). This was Tycho’s second consecutive nomination in the category, following Epoch’s nomination at the 2017 ceremony (59th Annual Grammy Awards).

The other nominees in the Best Dance/Electronic Album category were: - Apparat – LP5 - The Chemical Brothers – No Geography (winner) - Flume – Hi This Is Flume - Rufus Du Sol – Solace

The Chemical Brothers took the award for No Geography. But the nomination itself was significant: it confirmed that the Recording Academy recognized the vocal iteration of Tycho alongside its instrumental predecessor, and it validated the creative risk of the album’s direction in the eyes of the industry’s most prominent awards body.

To celebrate the nomination, Tycho released the Stress EP on December 12, 2019. The three-track EP united the Weather highlight “No Stress (Feat. Saint Sinner)” with “No Stress (Instrumental)” and a new recording called “Stress” – the track that would later give its name to the closing song on Simulcast. The EP functioned as both a Grammy celebration and a bridge between the two albums. Hansen also released a mini-documentary about the making of the Grammy-nominated album around this time, offering visual documentation of the Weather creative process.

Fan Response: The Divide

The addition of vocals to Tycho was, by any factual accounting, divisive. The range of fan and critical responses to Weather was wider than for any previous Tycho release, and the fault line ran directly through the vocal question.

Critical Reception

On Metacritic, Weather received a weighted average score that reflected mixed-to-positive reviews. The album’s critical reception divided along a consistent axis: reviewers who found the vocal integration successful versus those who felt it undermined what made Tycho distinctive.

Audioxide gave the album a composite score of 16/30 (individual scores of 5, 6, and 5 out of 10 from three reviewers). Reviewer Andre Dack wrote that when Saint Sinner’s vocals “take centre stage – which is the vast majority of the 30-minute run time – the album feels ordinary, isolated, and understated to a fault.” He described it as “ambient Muzak” that “barely leaves any impression at all.” Reviewer Frederick O’Brien stated: “Thin, wispy vocals only reinforce the sense that nothing’s really happening.” Reviewer Andrew Bridge suggested the vocals “inhibit, not augment” the weight needed for the album. All three reviewers praised the instrumental tracks – “Into the Woods,” “Weather,” and “Easy” – while expressing skepticism about the vocal material.

The Line of Best Fit awarded a 6/10 and offered a more nuanced assessment. The reviewer noted that “it often doesn’t feel like an out-and-out Tycho record, but more one in which he’s riding shotgun to the breathy, ethereal vocals of Saint Sinner.” The album was described as containing “moments of true, shining brilliance” that Hansen “often doesn’t give himself the breathing room to explore.” However, the review praised “Japan” specifically as a successful collaboration and suggested that if Hansen could “master” the balance between his instrumental strengths and vocal collaborations, “he will likely be making the best music of his career.”

Glide Magazine took a more positive view, noting that Tycho featured live vocals for the first time on a “creatively inspired” record.

Far Out Magazine found that the vocals fostered “a sense of intimacy” that expanded the project’s emotional range.

Everything Is Noise, Paste Magazine, and Clash Magazine offered their own assessments across the spectrum, contributing to a critical landscape that was neither uniformly positive nor uniformly negative but consistently centered on the same question: did the vocals add to or subtract from the Tycho identity?

Fan Responses

Among fans, the reactions were, if anything, more polarized than the critical reception. User reviews and online discussion forums captured the full range:

Positive responses included fans who found new emotional depth and accessibility in the vocal tracks, who described the vocals as adding “an extra level of ambience that simply couldn’t exist before, deepening the tracks beyond just a set of computer-generated sounds” and “adding emotion without overwhelming.”

Negative responses ranged from measured disappointment to outright rejection. Some fans stated that “vocals are ruining the experience” and indicated they would buy the instrumental version instead. Harsher assessments described the vocal tracks as making the record sound generic, with some calling the approach a fundamental misunderstanding of what drew them to Tycho in the first place.

The middle ground included fans who appreciated the experiment’s ambition while preferring specific tracks. Many gravitated toward the instrumental bookends (“Easy” and “Weather”) and “Into the Woods” while finding the vocal tracks less compelling but not objectionable.

Hansen’s Awareness and Response

Hansen was clearly aware that the vocal direction would be polarizing. He released instrumental versions of the two vocal singles alongside their vocal counterparts – a gesture that acknowledged the existence of fans who would want the Tycho they already knew. When touring the new material, Hansen told PopMatters he “thought the new stuff might take time to connect,” but was pleasantly surprised by the live reception: “People were singing along, it was kind of crazy.”

The live response suggested something the recorded reception did not fully capture: that the vocal material functioned differently in a concert setting, where the communal experience of a Tycho show could absorb and integrate the human voice in ways that headphone listening sometimes could not.

Simulcast: The Companion Album (February 28, 2020)

Seven months after Weather, Tycho released Simulcast on February 28, 2020, via Mom + Pop / Ninja Tune. The album was announced in late January 2020 alongside the lead single “Outer Sunset.”

The Concept

Hansen explained the album’s title and purpose on the Ninja Tune press page with a statement that became the definitive framing for the project: “A Simulcast is the transmission of a program across different mediums and in different languages. With these two albums I wanted to present the same ideas in two languages, one more literal and the other more open to interpretation.”

He elaborated: “Simulcast expands on the concepts laid out in Weather but shifts into the abstract with instrumental soundscapes in place of lyrics, opening up a visual space and translating the message into a new language.”

The metaphor was precise. A simulcast in broadcasting is the same program delivered simultaneously through different channels – a radio show aired on television, a concert streamed online. Hansen positioned Weather and Simulcast not as an album and its lesser derivative but as two equal transmissions of a single creative signal, each complete in its own medium.

Tracklist and Correspondences

Simulcast contains eight tracks, each corresponding to a Weather track but bearing a different name (with two exceptions):

Simulcast Track Weather Counterpart
1. Weather Weather
2. Alright For How Long
3. Outer Sunset Skate
4. Into The Woods Into The Woods
5. Easy Easy
6. PCH Pink & Blue
7. Cypress Japan
8. Stress No Stress

The renaming was deliberate. By giving each track its own identity, Hansen signaled that these were not the same songs with the voice removed. “Weather,” “Into The Woods,” and “Easy” – the three tracks that were already instrumental on Weather – retained their names but received new treatments. The five vocal tracks were reimagined and renamed, each title carrying its own associations.

Why Simulcast Is Not Just a Vocal Strip

This distinction is critical to understanding what Simulcast is. Hansen did not take the Weather session files, mute the vocal track, and bounce to a new master. As multiple sources confirmed, the instrumental versions underwent substantive reworking.

Hansen told Grit Daily: “I also wanted to show how you can take a pop-forward song like ‘Pink & Blue’ and completely change the tone and mood by removing the vocal and adding a lead.” This statement reveals the compositional work involved: where a voice had been, a new instrumental element was composed and placed. The absence of the vocal was not left as negative space. It was filled.

Reviews confirmed the distinction. The Exclaim! review, which awarded the album a 90/100 score, described Simulcast as “a shining and beautifully crafted album” and noted that tracks like “PCH” and “Stress” sound “familiar initially but develop new direction and sonic texture with each listen.” Grit Daily’s assessment found that the instrumental versions “feel complete despite the removal of the vocals,” suggesting Hansen successfully maintained artistic integrity while adapting the material.

The reworkings involved specific changes: subtle new drums were added, guitar and synth parts became more prominent, and there was a greater focus on non-vocal elements to make them stand out. The songs with Saint Sinner’s vocals had been reconfigured so that the instrumentation was enriched and the melodic content given room to breathe differently.

The Weather instrumentals that had already existed – “Easy,” “Into The Woods,” and “Weather” – also received fresh attention rather than being ported over unchanged. The Simulcast versions of these tracks occupied the same conceptual space but with altered details, ensuring the album functioned as a unified work rather than a collection of originals and adaptations.

“Outer Sunset”

The lead single from Simulcast was “Outer Sunset,” the instrumental reimagining of “Skate” from Weather. The title references the Outer Sunset District of San Francisco, a neighborhood situated along the western edge of the city where Ocean Beach meets the residential grid. The Outer Sunset is defined by its coastal character – fog, surf, the sound of the Pacific.

Hansen spent considerable time in the Outer Sunset neighborhood during the recording of both Weather and Simulcast. The track’s title directly honors this geography, connecting the music to a specific physical place in the way that Tycho’s work has often been tied to the landscapes of Northern California. The San Francisco beach community provided both the literal setting for the album’s creation and an evocative name for one of its standout compositions.

“Outer Sunset” was released in late January 2020 alongside the Simulcast album announcement, giving fans their first taste of how the companion album would translate the Weather material.

Critical Reception of Simulcast

Simulcast was received favorably by critics, with a Metacritic score of 67 based on four reviews (three positive, one mixed, no negative). This was a notable contrast to the more divided reception of Weather.

Exclaim! gave the album 90/100, with reviewer Dylan Barnabe calling it “a shining and beautifully crafted album that reaffirms Hansen’s hold atop of 21st century ambient electronic” work. Barnabe praised Hansen’s ability to create “the physical and visual boundary of music’s equivalent to the horizon line,” providing “perspective, stability, vision and a vanishing point.”

The warmer reception for Simulcast among critics suggested that when Hansen operated in the purely instrumental space – even when the material had originated as vocal compositions – the results aligned more closely with what critics and long-term fans expected and valued from Tycho. This does not constitute a judgment on whether the vocal or instrumental versions were “better”; it is a factual observation about the critical response patterns.

The Resolution: Two Albums, Two Languages, One Arc

The Weather/Simulcast pair, taken together, represents something unusual in contemporary music: a deliberate, planned two-album statement that addressed a creative tension directly rather than leaving it unresolved.

Hansen’s decision to create Simulcast was not purely reactive – not simply a concession to fans who rejected the vocal direction. The timeline suggests the instrumental album was planned from early in the process. In his 2019 interview with This Song Is Sick, conducted around the time of Weather’s release, Hansen already mentioned forthcoming plans: an instrumental version of Weather releasing in November, plus a separate instrumental record written parallel to Weather. He spoke of wanting to “put out more music this time around and stay busy with production and the live show.” What became Simulcast appears to have absorbed both intentions – the instrumental companion versions and new instrumental material – into a single cohesive album.

The “two languages” framework Hansen articulated was not just marketing copy. It described a genuine structural feature of the project. Weather presented its ideas through the literal medium of the human voice – lyrics with words, meanings, and personal narratives. Simulcast presented those same ideas through the abstract medium of instrumental composition – melodies, textures, and atmospheres that communicated without linguistic specificity. Each album was complete. Neither required the other to function. But together, they offered a comprehensive view of the same creative material, translated across the boundary that had defined the central tension of the era.

For fans who embraced the vocal direction, Weather stood as a satisfying creative evolution. For fans who preferred instrumental Tycho, Simulcast delivered a full album of new material in the mode they loved. For fans curious about both, the pair offered a rare opportunity to hear the same compositional ideas expressed through fundamentally different means – to understand what a voice adds by hearing its presence and its absence applied to the same source material.

The Stress EP, released between the two albums in December 2019, made the bridge explicit: it contained “No Stress” with vocals, “No Stress” as an instrumental, and the new track “Stress” – three versions of a single idea, each occupying its own space.

Hansen emerged from the Weather/Simulcast cycle having accomplished several things simultaneously. He fulfilled the vocal ambition he had carried since 2003. He introduced Hannah Cottrell’s voice and songwriting to his audience. He earned his second Grammy nomination. He established relationships with Mom + Pop and Ninja Tune. And he demonstrated, through the companion album model, that bringing vocals to Tycho did not mean abandoning the instrumental identity – that both could coexist as parallel expressions of the same creative vision.

The two albums, released eight months apart, presented what Hansen called the same ideas in two languages. What they also presented was a model for how an artist could take a creative risk, absorb the response, and offer a resolution that honored both the experiment and the tradition – without apologizing for either.

Sources