The guitarist and producer took what he learned in a Sumatran rainforest community and built a band around it. Its newest single, "You Don't Care," arrives October 2.

Most bands fight to protect the sound of the people in them. Ramsey Elkholy built Monotronic to do the reverse. Players come and go from record to record, each one bringing their own instincts, and the goal is for the finished song to sound like it came from a single source rather than a room full of competing voices. That idea runs through everything the project has released since 2016, including its new single "You Don't Care," out October 2.

Field notes

The thinking behind Monotronic started long before the band did. Elkholy spent two years backpacking, studied Indian music in Calcutta, and then went back to Southeast Asia to live for two years with the Orang Rimba, a community in the rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia.

What stayed with him there had less to do with any particular sound than with how people lived. Among the Orang Rimba, the group takes priority over the individual, and almost nothing belongs to one person alone. For a musician, that's a radical model. Credit, ownership, and the spotlight are things most artists spend their careers trying to secure. Elkholy came home with the opposite instinct: make the work belong to everyone who touches it.

One distinct whole

Back in the studio, that principle turned into a working method. Elkholy describes Monotronic as a concept as much as a band. Each instrument is meant to pick up where the previous one leaves off, so that no single part stands apart from the rest. A guitar line should feel like it grew out of the drum pattern, and a synth should feel like it finishes a thought the bass started.

It's a demanding standard, and it shapes who gets invited in. Over the years, Monotronic has drawn musicians who've played with David Bowie, Joe Jackson, and Daft Punk, and on Waiting for You, the album the band released earlier this year, Omar Hakim plays drums on every track. Players at that level don't need to prove anything, which makes them ideal for a band where the goal is to blend in rather than stand out.

The results are easy to like even if the theory never crosses your mind. Monotronic sits close to Phoenix, Beck, and The Postal Service, with the guitars pushed further forward, and percussion and tonalities that trace back to Elkholy's years in India and Southeast Asia. The album's opening track, "Looking Away," recently passed 1 million streams on Spotify, and Waiting for You is approaching 4 million streams in a little over six months.

The maker and the made

"You Don't Care" brings a new tension into that picture. Elkholy wrote the lyrics on a beach in Tulum, where much of Waiting for You also took shape, and the song was meant for the album. Its mood didn't match the other eleven tracks, though, so he set it aside for two years until it could come out on its own.

On the surface, it's a breakup song. A man slowly realizes the person beside him has already let go. The video, which Elkholy directed with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina in mind, recasts that story as a female android and the man who built her. He made her, and he still can't make her feel what he wants her to feel.

For an artist whose whole method depends on letting go of control, that's a telling image. Monotronic works because Elkholy shapes the frame and then lets the people inside it contribute something he couldn't have written alone. The man in the video tries to engineer every response and ends up with nothing. The song carries a quiet argument about making things: you can't build connection by controlling every part of it.

What stays shared

There's still a single hand guiding the project. Elkholy writes, produces, and directs the videos, releases the music through his own imprint, Monotronic Records LLC, and keeps listeners close through the band's Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. But the sound he's chasing isn't a signature. It's a blend, and he seems most satisfied when you can't tell where one player ends and the next begins.

That blend has carried Monotronic through a successful fall tour, and Elkholy is now at work on the next album. "You Don't Care" shows the idea from a new side in the meantime. It's a song about someone who stopped giving anything back, made by a band whose whole premise is that everyone gives something. It's out October 2.

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