LOCUST
“The idea of repeating these expressions of desire and longing over and over, because you are aching to be together.” — Mark Van Hoen
Some songs take years to become what they need to be. Mark Van Hoen began recording what would become “Long Distance Lover” back in 2020 — a collaboration with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead that sat dormant, unfinished, waiting for the right voice. When Van Hoen sent the track to Irish vocalist Natasha Morrow, she heard something in it that he hadn’t planned for: the ache of long-distance love, the ritual repetition of desire spoken across phone lines and miles.
The result is one of the most emotionally precise things to emerge from the Locust project in years — pulsating synths and Halstead’s measured guitar draped around Morrow’s vocals like a frequency trying to close a gap it can’t fully close. It is, on its surface, a song about longing. But it is also, quietly, about the strange intimacy of a collaboration between people who had never met.
“He combines oceanic drone with pop lyricism, using technology as a catalyst.”
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.
“I had actually never met Natasha, and generally, I find that remote collabs don’t work because there’s a connection missing somehow. But in Natasha’s case, I had several long phone calls with her, and I think we connected that way.”
“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.
“Falling somewhere between ambient and engaging, passive and compelling…”
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.
