GoGo Penguin

GoGo Penguin emerged from Manchester, England, as an unconventional jazz piano trio that fuses rock, post-bop jazz, and minimalist classical elements with electronic production techniques. Their 2014 sophomore album v2.0 earned a Mercury Prize shortlist, prompting a signing with Blue Note and the release of their label debut Man Made Object, which reached the Top Ten on the jazz albums charts. Later releases such as 2018's A Humdrum Star and the self-titled 2020 album posted similar chart results, while the 2021 remix set GGP/RMX reinforced the trio's ties to electronic music. Emerging from a stretch of personal loss and mourning, the 2023 full-length Everything Is Going to Be OK followed.

The group formed in Manchester in 2012 when pianist Chris Illingworth, bassist Nick Blacka, and drummer Rob Turner came together. They merge melodic soundscapes with rapid, skittering rhythms and electronic textures, producing a dense hybrid that draws equally from Massive Attack and Brian Eno as from standard jazz or classical sources. Two early albums appeared on the Gondwana label, beginning with 2012's Fanfares and expanding outward on 2014's v2.0, the latter securing another Mercury Prize nomination. A deal with Blue Note was finalized in early 2015, after which they recorded and issued their third album, Man Made Object, at the start of the next year.

Two years on, A Humdrum Star sustained the band's cross-genre experiments; in 2019 the members chose to skip touring and concentrate solely on studio work, resulting that same year in the EP Ocean in a Drop: Music for Film, inspired by Philip Glass' 1982 cult documentary Koyaanisqatsi. Their fifth album, the self-titled GoGo Penguin, arrived in 2020. Co-produced by Joe Reiser and Brendan Williams, the ten-track collection adopted a fresh writing process in which each member generated separate songs that were later assembled into extended mini-suites. Released in early June 2020, the album was reworked the following year as the remix album GGP/RMX, featuring versions by Squarepusher, Machinedrum, and James Holden. Drummer Rob Turner had by then exited, replaced by Jon Scott, while the members grieved the deaths of several relatives. In response they shaped the optimistic 2023 full-length Everything Is Going to Be OK, issued on Sony Music's neo-classical imprint XXIM Records.