Electronic musician John Tejada returns with The Watchline, one of his best albums to date. It’s admittedly difficult for specific songs to stand out in Tejada‘s hyper-prolific career. Between LPs, EPs, DJ sets, and other albums, he’s had more than 30 releases in as many years, and that’s not counting his separate bands, Wajatta and Optometry, or his record label, Palette Recordings. Consequently, his output has sometimes blurred together in the flurry of his own fertile imagination, but The Watchline feels distinctive for Tejada.
While often genre-resistant, Tejada’s career sometimes lends itself to retroactive demarcations of phases and styles. There were the glitchy twitches of his early, crunchier and wackier work, such as 2002’s Daydreams in Cold Weather and 2004’s Logic Memory Center, followed by more populist techno singles and remixes for the club. That faded into the more sophisticated, lush EDM of 2011’s Parabolas and 2015’s Signs Under Test, which had warmer synths than Tejada’s earlier output but were still rather emotionally antiseptic in their beats. Since 2018’s Dead Start Program, the musician’s setup and instrumentation have been more focused and streamlined.
Starting with 2023’s Resound and now 2025’s “The Watchline”, Tejada seems to be in a more personal and fuzzier phase. Defined by guitar-led feedback, melodic ambience, graceful breakbeats, and the direct influence of his Optometry bandmate March Adstrum, this is arguably Tejada’s most beautiful and decidedly nostalgic period. Like Resound, his new record is layered with the hazy static of detuned feedback complemented by emotional washes of ambient synths and the occasional, welcome deconstruction of Adstrum’s unique voice.
The opener, “Until the End of the World”, is an excellent statement of intent, introducing the distorted but calm feedback that coats much of the album. The actual sound is fantastic, and it isn’t long before soft electronic melodies and subtle guitar riffs blend with increasing bombast, all held together by typically simple yet assured breakbeats. It’s wonderfully produced but never lets studio wizardry obfuscate the emotion throughout.
The same could even be said about much more cavernous songs, with “Until the End of the World” leading into the louder, almost industrial “Greywake”. There’s a clarity to that song’s electronic melodies that’s never smudged by its pounding percussion, though. “Greywake”, and especially the later tracks “Driftreturn” and “Hollowcrest”, feel excitingly fresh in the same way Burial did in 2006. Featuring apparitions of melodies, ghostly percussion, caliginous low-end, and stratified static, these songs are almost Tejada’s attempt at dissecting industrial music and power electronics. One could call it post-hauntological industrial ambience, if one wanted to be obnoxious.
Thanks to its cohesive production and the way Tejada relies on certain types of feedback throughout, The Watchline feels mostly cogent and of a piece, despite the arguably mishandled sequencing of the album’s second half. Each of the songs is excellent, especially the explicitly ambient tracks “The Navigator” (a gorgeous, placid thing) and “Through the Watchline” (a moody, fitting closer). Between them, though, the heavy breakbeats and maximalist production of “Until the Light Bends” feel out of place (though it’s quite the banger with headphones); it would’ve bonded better in the album’s first half. Meanwhile, “Vaporail” sounds more like it belongs on a Boards of Canada album than The Watchline.
However, the two tunes with singer March Adstrum are predictably excellent. Her voice is a spectral echo throughout “Static Searching”, often sounding like monosyllabic marching orders. It’s colder than we might expect from Adstrum, but it functions well within the driving, dark techno of the track. Their other song, “Apricity”, is a testament to her gorgeous delivery and comes across like a shoegaze electropop ballad. It’s unforgettable, an ethereal standout.
It’s perhaps odd (not to mention condescending) to state that an artist with nearly 30 years of work is “all grown up”, but with The Watchline and 2023’s Resound, John Tejada seems at his most mature, intimate, and original. In marketing the album, Tejada wrote, “The Watchline is this idea of a boundary, a place between memory and forgetting, between land and ocean, between who we were and who we’re becoming”. If this album is any indication, Tejada is still in that process of becoming after three decades, and it’s an electric evolution.