Frutiger aero, the visual design language of glossy interfaces and soft, nature-adjacent imagery that gave consumer software its characteristic warmth through an earlier era, has cycled back as a nostalgia aesthetic with enough momentum to support its own event format. Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn, the electro-pop duo known as Sylvan Esso, are preparing to attend a frutiger aero renfaire. Their new album, "Ow ∞," was released this past Friday.
The timing fits a band that has always occupied a particular intersection. Sylvan Esso has been releasing music since 2014, when their self-titled debut introduced the format: low-key electro-pop, with the single "Hey Mami" as its first wide signal. The sound they arrived with was shaped enough to be recognizable and open enough to sustain continuous revision.
How the catalog has moved
The successive albums have operated as iterative pressure on that original format. "Free Love" moved toward dustier, more fragile textures. "No Rules Sandy" pushed in the opposite direction: dancier, glitchier. Neither departure dissolved what makes a Sylvan Esso record sound like one. Meath and Sanborn have consistently held the center while testing where the edges can go.
"Ow ∞" represents perhaps the boldest reinvention of their sound to date. Given that "Free Love" and "No Rules Sandy" already each constituted meaningful shifts from the debut, a new claim of greatest departure has to clear a bar that has been rising with each record. What "perhaps the boldest" means in practice is something listeners are now working out.
The frutiger aero renfaire occupies a specific corner of digital nostalgia culture, organized around an aesthetic defined by optimistic, high-gloss imagery from an earlier moment in consumer technology. That a duo invested in the warmth achievable inside electronic production would find their way to that circuit makes a certain kind of sense.
Separately, Meath and Sanborn have a practical recommendation: spend more and buy the good yogurt.