Sam Prekop has shared the expansive piece and title track for his new album Open Close (Thrill Jockey), ahead of the album release Sept. 26, 2025. The opening movement provides a gentle droning liftoff before diving head-first into a fountain of micro-melodies, percussive grooves and morphing textural electronic vistas. Prekop emphasizes an ever-shifting perspective across the piece, directed by his inquisitive compositional approach. Mirroring that process in devising titles and developing themes on the record, Prekop explains: “I like simple words that become complicated if you think of them more than a second or two… If it gives everything away too quickly, then I’m not interested.”

The music of Sam Prekop is defined by curiosity of his instrument and its boundaries guided by a strong pop sensibility. His ability to combine both into a wholly unique sound is evident throughout Open Close. Soulfully human sounds from synthetic textures precisely juxtaposed, the subtle contrasts in texture and rhythm are a free-flowing celebration of sonics as stunning as they are ephemeral. The sound world of Open Close is Prekop’s richest and most lush while paradoxically the sound is more spacious and expansive. Acting as a near-facsimile to creating space for improvisers, the pieces leave air for singular voices to propel the pieces forward with melodic motion, often surrounded by gorgeous, swirling ornaments composed around them.

Open Close is an album that captures the flow and energy of a live performance through the lens of a deft craftsman, an equilibrium of intuitive composition and the excitement of possibility. Open Close melds more abstract textural noise into lush synthetic landscapes. “In my mind that’s what the modular is really good at doing, adding interesting and less predictable textural elements,” notes Prekop. “That’s only one part of the dialog though. It energizes the other sounds and voices. Along with the steady rhythmic pulses I’ve been gravitating towards, the juxtaposition of those elements becomes a form of architecture within abstraction, just by imposing them on each other and layering them in a precise way.”