Solardo ‘Freedom’: Tech House Summer Anthem Lands on Blanc

Solardo have never really had an awkward era. Mark Richards and James Eliot — the Manchester duo who’ve spent the past decade operating with quietly surgical efficiency across house music’s biggest rooms and imprints — dropped ‘Freedom’ via Blanc in July 2026, and the track does exactly what the title suggests. It’s a direct, peak-time piece of tech house built for the height of summer, arriving alongside one of the more elaborately orchestrated release campaigns the scene has seen this season.

What ‘Freedom’ Sounds Like

The track’s architecture is straightforward by design. ‘Freedom’ is built around a thick, rolling bassline that sits at the centre of the mix and dictates the pocket from the opening bar. The four-to-the-floor kick keeps things driving, the groove is insistent rather than clever, and the topline production strips out anything that might slow it down. This is tech house that wants you dancing — and it makes that case without ambiguity.

What Solardo do well here, and have done consistently throughout their career, is build music that travels. The low-end punches across a room and the energy stays readable at the back of a festival field or in the close confines of an after-hours room. ‘Freedom’ covers both: loose enough for a poolside afternoon set, hard enough for a peak-time slot. The tension-and-release structure is familiar Solardo territory, but it’s executed with enough swing to justify the return to form it represents after a run of more melodic, vocal-led material earlier in the year.

The Blanc Partnership and the Campaign Around It

Blanc is the Manchester-born platform that began as a house and techno blog and grew into one of UK dance music’s most influential tastemaker brands, with over a million YouTube subscribers and a track record of breaking records at pivotal early-career moments. The partnership with Solardo is a logical one — two Manchester institutions, both operating with a clear sense of what their audience wants — and the scale of the campaign around ‘Freedom’ reflects that alignment.

The rollout went beyond a standard digital release. A collaboration with AU Vodka introduced the track via a surprise pop-up at Garden at Boxpark Liverpool on July 11, filmed in immersive 360-degree format and distributed across Blanc’s channels. A gold Lamborghini procession through Liverpool was part of the campaign, alongside fan activations designed to extend the release into physical space. The approach reflects where Solardo has been operating for several years: their releases increasingly function as campaign moments as much as music events, and the machine behind ‘Freedom’ is bigger than most acts at their level can pull off.

The Sola Records Context

Beyond their artist project, Solardo remain the founders of Sola Records, one of the underground’s most consistently strong house imprints. The label’s back catalogue traces the current generation’s emergence: CamelPhat, Sonny Fodera, Cloonee, SOSA, ANOTR, and Ben Hemsley have all moved through the Sola system. That context matters when placing ‘Freedom’ — this is a track from artists whose taste, at the label level, has consistently leaned underground even as their own productions have scaled up to arenas and festival mainstages.

That tension between underground credibility and mainstream reach is something Solardo has navigated better than most of their peers. ‘Freedom’ sits clearly on the commercial side of that line, but it does so without sacrificing the groove mechanics that made the duo credible in the first place.

Where ‘Freedom’ Fits in Summer 2026

Tech house is holding firm at the centre of the festival circuit in summer 2026. The genre’s structural dominance on mainstages globally is no longer a novelty — it’s the baseline. In that context, a track like ‘Freedom’ functions less as a statement about where the genre is going and more as a confident dispatch from the genre’s current centre of gravity.

Solardo have earned the right to operate at this scale without needing to justify it. ‘Freedom’ is not a left turn or a genre experiment — it’s a well-executed tech house track from a duo who understand exactly what they’re making and who they’re making it for. The campaign around it might be louder than the music itself, but the music holds up where it counts: on a dancefloor with the volume high.

‘Freedom’ is out now on Blanc.