Los Angeles and San Diego electronic duo UNTER STRØM close the chapter on their debut EP Between Forms with “Stumbling,” an atmospheric new single released via renegade label Breathing Records.
Led by Alex Gonzales of Matte Blvck and John Kunkel of The New Division and John Grand, UNTER STRØM have built their project around a shared obsession with pushing techno, melodic house, and industrial sonics into unfamiliar territory. Across their growing catalog, the duo have developed a cinematic sound that balances underground intensity with expansive melodic detail.
“Stumbling” finds them at their most atmospheric and emotionally exposed. Shifting arpeggios, submerged textures, and evolving rhythms move through the track with an almost weightless quality, creating a striking contrast between serene passages and moments of rising intensity.
There is an unmistakable sense of landscape embedded in the production. Open air. Forests. Rain moving across something distant. The feeling of wandering without necessarily wanting to be found. Yet despite its spacious atmosphere, “Stumbling” never completely leaves the dancefloor behind.
That tension sits at the heart of UNTER STRØM’s musical identity. From the beginning, Gonzales and Kunkel have approached electronic music as something capable of existing in multiple spaces at once: physical enough for a club, detailed enough for headphones, and expansive enough to eventually be reinterpreted in a live setting.
Interestingly, “Stumbling” emerged almost by accident. The duo had not intended to begin a writing session that afternoon when they opened a new project and started experimenting. An arpeggio appeared, followed by a rhythm, and within a few hours, much of the track had already taken shape.
For months afterward, Gonzales and Kunkel assumed they would eventually return to the session and develop it further. They barely did.
As their catalog continued to grow, the original recording remained largely untouched. What initially felt unfinished gradually began to feel complete precisely because the duo had resisted the urge to overwork it.
Aaron Short returned to mix “Stumbling,” continuing his work with UNTER STRØM and helping the duo push further into the finer details of their productions without sacrificing their distinctive character. On the new single, some of those details feel almost fleeting, with sounds emerging from beneath the surface before disappearing again.
The result is one of the more unusual records in the duo’s early catalog. While “Stumbling” carries echoes of the melodic electronic music that initially drew both artists toward expansive dance records, it avoids settling into nostalgia or any single genre. Instead, it occupies the space between them.
That makes the track a natural conclusion to Between Forms.
Across “Orynth,” “Fold,” “Fragment,” and “Stumbling,” UNTER STRØM have avoided establishing a rigid formula. Each track reveals a different side of the same creative project, moving between tension and release, darkness and openness, rhythm and atmosphere.
Between Forms ultimately serves less as a definitive statement of what UNTER STRØM is than as an introduction to what the project could become. With a rapidly expanding body of unreleased material behind them, the duo are already looking beyond the boundaries established by their debut.
And with “Stumbling,” those boundaries begin to disappear.