Cloonee's Debut Album 'Are You Still You?' Is the Tech House Statement of 2026

The Album That Redefines Cloonee

When Cloonee announced Are You Still You? back in August, it felt like the question was rhetorical. Of course he's still him — the UK-born, LA-based producer who's spent the better part of a decade perfecting the kind of tech house that doesn't apologise for its hooks. But the album, which landed October 6 on Good Music For Bad People and his own Hellbent Records imprint, actually earns the interrogation. Across 16 tracks, Cloonee doesn't just confirm what he's always been — he expands it in almost every direction at once, and somehow keeps the whole thing feeling coherent.

The Lead-Up Was Already a Statement

The pre-release run gave us a road map. "Good Girl" with Prospa (featuring Tristan Henry) hit Beatport No. 1 and racked up over 3.5 million streams — their second Beatport chart-topper together in 2026, after "Free Your Mind." "Back of the Club," pushed through Ministry of Sound at 130 BPM, sat in that stripped-back tech house pocket Cloonee built his reputation on: direct, functional, relentless. "Get Up and Dance" went a different route, reaching toward Franky Rizardo's territory with a looser, shuffled groove. By the time "Movimiento" arrived, featuring Yandel and ATLAC, it was clear this wasn't going to be a single-mood record.

Chris Lake, Joseph Capriati, and the Peak-Time Anchor

The album's standout — and its most revealing moment — is "Paradise," the Chris Lake collaboration featuring Aiyah's Interlude. Lake brings what he always brings to a peak-time record: that elastic, pressure-building low-end and a sense of restrained drama that makes the drop feel earned rather than cheap. The two artists have a shared understanding of how to hold tension across a long build, and "Paradise" shows it. It's the kind of track that works in a festival set and in a proper club, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

Elsewhere, "It's Time" with Joseph Capriati is the album's deepest dive into techno-adjacent territory — Capriati's influence pushes the rhythm harder, strips back the melodic warmth, and arrives at something closer to Napoli's underground than anything Cloonee has done before. It sits well here, providing ballast to the more pop-adjacent moments elsewhere on the record.

The Unexpected Corners

What makes Are You Still You? interesting beyond its club credentials is where it goes when it stops trying to fill a room. "3:30AM" with SOSA and Lzee has that after-hours quality — a slower pulse, more space, the kind of track that works when the crowd has thinned and the serious listeners are still there. "True Love Never Dies" with Fallon reaches toward something genuinely emotional in a genre that often treats emotion as a liability. And "Nobody Likes the Records That You Play" — a collaboration with TocaDisco, whose lineage runs back to the disco-house tradition — is the album's sharpest left turn, digging into a groove that's built for somewhere darker and sweatier than an EDC mainstage.

"Don't You Want Me" with Chris Lorenzo closes things out with a nod to UK garage and the bassline traditions that both artists have drawn from, rounding out an album that's genuinely broader than anything Cloonee has released before.

What It Means for Tech House in 2026

Cloonee is currently sitting at No. 3 on Beatport's year-to-date artist sales chart. He has sold out North American and European tours, played Red Rocks, EDC Las Vegas, and Bonnaroo, and built Hellbent Records into a functioning independent operation. Are You Still You? is what a debut album looks like when an artist has spent years earning the right to make it — packed enough to justify the format, varied enough to surprise, and consistently rooted in the dancefloor even when it gets personal.

It doesn't reinvent tech house. It doesn't try to. What it does is prove that the genre, done with genuine craft and good ears for collaboration, still has room for records that hold up over repeated listens — not just as DJ tools, but as albums. That's rarer than it should be.

Stream Are You Still You? on Beatport · Available now on all platforms via Good Music For Bad People / Hellbent Records.