While some albums arrive with a concept, Pomelo’s Loreless (Sad Magic) feels more like a state of mind. The debut LP from Amsterdam duo Wynnm Murphy and Luke Elliott abandons tidy hooks and discernible narratives, setting out its own winding path via ambient electronics, art pop and experimental production.
None of the album’s open-endedness was by accident. Murphy and Elliott deliberately abandoned deadlines and stripped away expectations, commercial expectations and any inclination to force songs into a conventional mold. Every session began with a blank Ableton project, and if something wasn’t serving the music, it was shelved without ceremony.
With a little prodding from MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland, Murphy and Elliott come clean on remaining vulnerable, casting off expectations and finding the beauty in imperfection.
Loreless embraces discomfort. How did you balance emotional honesty with the desire to create something sonically immersive and beautiful?
Murphy: Vulnerability can be uncomfortable in my experience, and music has always been a safe space. The sonic base of these tracks seemed to dip into a new well of expression, and we committed to going with that flow.
Elliott: I’ve always loved the contrast of lush, ambient textures clashing with raw, honest emotions. I think they strike a balance organically. Artists like the Acid and Eartheater do it so well.
You’ve described making this record as “pure flow.” How did working with fewer boundaries change your songwriting and production compared to previous projects?
Elliott: It allowed us to be completely honest. When you have zero expectations, you lose all your inhibitions in the studio. On past projects, there was always that annoying voice wondering how people would react. But this time, we completely shut it down.
Murphy: I think we found reprieve from a world that always seems to be asking people to be something. There’s a great difference between being something and just being. Creating these songs felt like the convergence of permissions that we gave ourselves: to be angry, to be imperfect, to be curious, to ignore external—imagined—expectations, to truly expect nothing. It’s like we were exploring some doctrine. In expecting nothing, you may receive everything. We really didn’t give a shit in the production process.
Pomelo’s sound lands somewhere amid avant-garde electronics, ambient music and art pop, yet the songs remain remarkably inviting. How conscious were you of balancing experimentation with accessibility?
Elliott: I don’t really know that we did navigate that space. We got a lot of, “This is great, but too weird for us,” from industry people, which I thought meant they didn’t know how to sell it. We didn’t let it faze us, though. We knew the project was special, so we set up Sad Magic to birth it ourselves and create a home for other music that doesn’t fit into a neat little box. For us, it was mostly about experimentation and just seeing where the music takes us. The accessible bits weren’t necessarily intentional—just a symptom of our sounds colliding.
You both came into Pomelo with established creative backgrounds. What did each of you bring to the partnership that genuinely surprised the other?
Murphy: I have this video of us early on in the studio. While Luke’s editing or adjusting something on the vocal in the project, he says, “I mostly don’t have a clue what I’m doing, so … ” To which I responded with a side-eye, “I just don’t believe that at all.” Maybe he doesn’t know what he’s doing, though I doubt it. Luke’s creativity, curiosity and expert-level expression with analog production was fascinating and inspiring to me. It even made me wonder what his brain looks like, because he’s able to clock how any sound was made to a T. I make music much more from gut feeling, which is why I think the creative match worked so well.
Elliott: I stand by not having a clue. Trial and error and play is the sauce of life. What surprised me about Wynnm is that they are an insanely talented songwriter. They taught me a lot about song architecture. Pomelo is very much outside traditional song structure, but I think you need to have a deep understanding of those rules in order to break them and arrive at what we did—and that’s super special.
Electronic music is often associated with precision and detachment, but Loreless feels strikingly intimate. How important was it to preserve imperfections and emotional texture throughout the LP?
Elliott: Majorly. Part of the sound-design ethos when we got into the mix sessions with Richard Burki was enhancing, refocusing and preserving all those minute details. We did the mix in Atmos, so you can really create space—height, width and depth—to showcase those imperfections and textures. Which, to be fair, I’d buried in earlier mixes and demos. There’s no hiding when you mix in Atmos, and I think that helped create a bed for the emotional texture to lay in.
Murphy: So important. Loreless feels like detaching from perfection by attaching to imperfections. I learned that ambient electronic, as a genre, thrives on sonic artifacts, and I liked that a lot. It reminded us that we were capturing a moment. Amplifying those artifacts in Atmos only amplified Pomelo’s world.
