Locust is the long-running electronic project of English musician Mark Van Hoen — a body of work that Pitchfork once described as belonging to “a distinguished family tree,” tracing lines from Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream through to Autechre’s glitch and Boards of Canada’s pastoral IDM. That lineage is more than critical shorthand. It maps the actual arc of Van Hoen’s career: a musician who has lived through multiple waves of electronic music’s evolution without being consumed by any single one of them.

He has toured with Autechre and Aphex Twin. He has headlined festivals. He has cultivated, over decades, a cult following that AllMusic describes as drawn to “an extraordinary wealth of ideas and craft” that gives his work “timeless appeal.” And in recent years, a new wave of listeners has found their way to Locust through the trip-hop revival and cloud rap artists sampling his foundational work — an audience that didn’t exist when Van Hoen first started making records, but which has arrived at his catalog with the same devotion as those who’ve been there from the beginning.

“Long Distance Lover” arrives with a careful architecture. Neil Halstead’s guitar — recognizable to anyone who has spent time with Slowdive’s catalog — doesn’t announce itself. It settles into Van Hoen’s synth arrangements the way light settles into a room, gradually, until you realize everything looks different. Natasha Morrow’s vocals carry the track’s emotional weight without straining for it: there’s a particular discipline to singing about longing without overselling it, and she has it.

The official music video leans into the song’s central image — silhouettes moving in and out of frame, presence and absence made visual. It is a restrained piece of work, which is exactly right. The song doesn’t need embellishment. It needs space, and the video gives it that.

The release also marks a meaningful moment in Locust’s live chapter. Van Hoen has been performing new material across select U.S. dates since September with musician and NTS Radio DJ Olive Kimoto on lead vocals — their first live performances since supporting Massive Attack in the 90s. The new configuration has played Elsewhere, And Always Forever Festival, and Flower Moon Festival. On May 28, Locust plays Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown, California, alongside Dummy and Harmony Index.

There’s something quietly countercultural about a song like “Long Distance Lover” arriving in this particular moment. The cultural appetite for maximalism — for music that announces itself loudly and immediately — has never been stronger, and yet what Van Hoen has built here is a record about patience. About the willingness to let something unfold slowly, across years, across distances, across the inherent imperfection of connection made through technology.

That the collaboration itself mirrored the song’s subject matter — Van Hoen and Morrow establishing intimacy through long phone calls, never actually meeting — is the kind of detail that sounds too neat to be true. But it is true, and it deepens the track’s resonance. “Long Distance Lover” is a song about longing, made by people who understood longing firsthand, in the process of making it. That’s a rare thing.