By Katie Li

October 3rd 2025

From Argentina to Nigeria, Sweden to Colombia, Barcelona to Milan, this scattered choir of voices is bound not by language, not by genre, but by the singular production hand of Berlin’s Luca Eck. Eck has long been wielding techno’s eternal 4/4 pulse—the industrial lovechild of ¹a nearly imperceptible, rumbling sub-bass layered beneath ²a dependable, yet timeless saturated kick—like a metronome. Its distinct cadence is ever present across their half-decade-long discography, sitting devotedly as the foundation for whatever experimentation Eck finds themselves gravitating towards at any given moment that the beat may demand. Yet in their upcoming EP, FLESH, even that mechanical certainty is fracturing—overlooked in favor of other genres’ percussive sonic grids: that of the much subtler electropop, the 170 BPM, syncopated programming-nightmare patterns of jungle, or at times, nothing at all. And while FLESH may feel divergent from their past works, their ethos remains steadfast: an avant-garde exploration of identity and self-acceptance that is somehow as futuristic as it is nostalgic. If anything, the shift is a natural development, the final manifestation of the rejection to conformity and the status quo that Eck has always sought after:

“It’s [...] the most comprehensive record of who I am musically to date. Because I no longer wanted to explore different small points, but rather, find a way to encapsulate the entirety of what I stand for.”

Trace the roots and Eck’s departure from techno’s rigidity feels almost preordained. Raised on a healthy diet of eurodance and classical music—a palette about as antithetical as it gets—their creative instincts have always straddled the line between dancefloor maximalism and conservatory precision. Growing up in Berlin all but preordained exposure to the city’s inescapable techno mythology, yet Eck’s earliest musical fluency came instead from the disciplines of classical training in piano and double bass. And in yet another act of defiance, Eck tells us about their mounting disillusionment with the post-pandemic wave of techno’s mainstream—what was once subcultural resistance, they note, has devolved into “2000-person warehouse raves of shirtless men all dancing in unison.” In its place, the experimental pop that’s always lingered in their works, once submissive to techno’s relentless beat, has found itself as Eck’s chosen successor.

Even in Eck’s purest techno tracks, there’s melodic elements—from trance, from progressive house, from hip-hop—that contest the genre’s typically atonal mechanics; take a glance at their Spotify page’s top tracks, and the sole picture we’re shown is that we don’t have the full picture. In fact, click the first song on that list, “U&ME,” and you’re immediately hit with “sex, sex, s-s-sex” with a reggaeton inflection that you can really let loose to. It’s one of Eck’s most streamed and one of many collaborations with Buenos Aires’ Six Sex, whose 2024 debut feature with Eck, “sexo no tradicional,” feels like the very first of their new poppier epoch: a feat backed by their typical track length of 6 minutes being halved to just 2 and ½ minutes (the perfect length for a song, at least, for my rapidly deteriorating attention span and exponential cerebral decay). Existing in two nearly identical forms—the other with a German verse from Berlin’s SHOKI and a new name, “nympho”—the track is Eck’s first in a series of increasingly provocative songs (lyrics include i.e., “I wanna whip you” and “I’m a hot girl. I do hot shit”). And while Eck admits they typically relinquish all creative freedom to the featured artist, they stand by that playfulness: “I just wanna overcome any dualities that people have [...] and open up a space for music that can be super silly and very provocative, but also profound and sophisticated at the same time.” 

Prior to the transatlantic sleeper duo’s formation, the vocals atop Eck’s anthemic warehouse-rave masterpieces manifested drastically differently. Their second song ever, the 2020 single “Walking the Edge”, threads a vocal bridge that sounds less like a hook and more like a wartime broadcast, its monotone, Mid-Atlantic tinged delivery more announcement than melody. “Whenever I Open My Eyes, It’s You That I Want to See” follows in a similar atonal register, the only departure a chopped-up vocal fragment that flickers texturally like a synth pad; the bridge—delivered in the cadence of a voicemail—reads more like an uncertain affirmation than a chorus (“I am the best version of myself”). On “Fatima’s Prayers”, the voice all but dissolves into atmosphere, sampled without words, shrouded in reverb and, floating true to its name, like cathedral echoes. By 2023, “Hide” ft. LVRA introduced something new yet again: Eck’s first real topline, gliding with an ethereal quality not unlike FKA twigs. And though Eck is never the voice on their songs, the evolution of their vocal use signals their steady drift toward something more immediate, more digestible, and closer to pop.

Yet, Eck’s upcoming FLESH EP—arriving late November—guts Eck’s blueprint entirely: all vocally-oriented, no four-on-the-floor heartbeat, no comfort zone. Instead, more conventional pop structures take the wheel, fortified by a cast of international heavy-hitters—picking up as a natural sequel to the border-blurring energy that 2024 EP, Consumed, introduced. 

While I have to remain tightlipped (November, come soon…), today, Eck premieres its leading single and title track “FLESH,” their insight into the project’s unflinching new identity. A collaboration with YEAR0001 artist Namasenda, its vocals are more central than ever, both sonically and spatially, glazed in the autotune processing signature to hyperpop. Its vocals are more central than ever, both sonically to listeners and spatially, glazed in the autotune processing signature to hyperpop. What follows is pure maximalist electropop—glitchy synth stabs colliding with a gritty saw bassline, a hardstyle kick puncturing the buildup before the chorus, and not a trace of techno left in sight. The single arrives hand-in-hand with a beautifully cinematic video: fleeting snapshots of dozens of nondescript yet unquestionably familiar places, nostalgic in the way bootcuts darken in beachwater or smoke curls across the dash of a 2000s car; but also futuristic, even dystopian, as Eck is guided through endless corridors of sterile white walls under the watch of circling drones. True to both its title, there’s plenty of shots on the human body from goosebumps on the skin to the eye’s blood vessels paralleling the cracks of a decaying ceiling. Yet, with its repetition of “take it off” in conjunction with a melancholic delivery, it’s clear the shots are more than observational and not always celebratory; an exploration of the, often, rocky relationships we have with our physical bodies. For now, you can quench the thirst with “FLESH”, but keep your ears tuned—Eck’s full-length EP is looming, and it promises to rewrite the rules all over again.

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Watch our full conversation with Luca Eck below.