Shallow Hits: Ebbb's debut at full stretch

Shallow Hits is Ebbb's first album: eleven tracks of electronic pop that go off like a festival set, built for crowds and detailed enough for headphones. It arrives on Ninja Tune on July 10, with a producer's hand left on every layer.

Ebbb's first release was the EP All At Once, in June 2024, and the summer that followed went on bootleg remixes of Charli XCX, Rosalia, Sampha, Artemas and Camila Cabello. The singles came in a steady run: Manners in July 2025, Eyes that September, Book That You Like in November, Home Ground this March. Shallow Hits is the album all of it was leading to.

William Rowland sings, plays keys and writes the lyrics, working with producers Levent Ceylan and Tom Stafford. Stafford recorded and mixed, Max Gilkes mastered, and Marina Moore's violin and viola are threaded through the arrangements. The sleeve is a photographic collage by Mike Six with design by Flavio Mancini, pressed on translucent turquoise in a die-cut outer sleeve with an artworked inner. The Dinked Edition adds a 45 RPM seven-inch carrying Book That You Like and Manners, both already out on their own.

The sound is bright and physical, and it moves fast. Come Alive opens on a quiet whirr, then breaks into sun, with calypso-like figures under electronic pop pushed to festival scale. Now You Know does the same trick at a sprint, a chorus built to be shouted by a field of people hearing it for the first time, and nothing in the first half sits still.

Side On is where the record gets strange. It moves like a drum'n'bass club and sings like a church choir. The title track is the only song here over four minutes, and it earns the length: five minutes of pop that keeps opening up under the chorus. The pull between the crowd and the congregation is what makes the record work.

Youth pulls back into the moody techno textures and stacked harmonies of the EP. I'm Not Enough closes with the hardest hit on the album, two and a half minutes that land and stop.

This is for anyone who wants pop with a club's low end and a choir's top line, and who can live with an album that changes its mind every three minutes. The All At Once EP is the entry point, and Shallow Hits extends it. If you need a debut to hold one sound for eleven tracks, look elsewhere.

That ambition has a cost. Eleven tracks, one of them over four minutes, means the record keeps cutting away from its best ideas, and Side On is the clearest case: the drums and the choir get three minutes together before the album moves on. The two closing tracks are the shortest here, so the gut punch of I'm Not Enough lands in two and a half minutes and is gone.

More debuts should have this problem. The record is loud where it counts and careful everywhere else, and the two do not cancel each other out. Shallow Hits is a 4. Put Side On on loud, then start again at the top and listen to what the keyboards are doing.

The tracklist

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