Longboat Returns With “Holiday on Saturn” Ahead of Album 35
Igor Keller isn’t slowing down. His Seattle-based project Longboat has a new single dropping April 3 — “Holiday on Saturn,” a disco track that leads into Album 35, out April 17. It’s the first real glimpse at what the new record sounds like, and if the single is any indication, Keller is having fun with it.
The premise is exactly what it sounds like: a guide to partying on Saturn without getting crushed by the atmosphere. Longboat runs with it fully, building something high-energy and groove-heavy without losing the experimental instincts that have always set Longboat apart. Pulsing rhythms, layered instrumentation, a polished disco feel — it moves, but there’s real craft underneath it. The concept isn’t just a gimmick to hang a beat on. It shapes the whole track, the way Longboat concepts tend to do.
As usual, Longboat handled writing, arranging, conducting, and producing himself, with Ryan Leyva and Will Moore contributing backing vocals. A full string section rounds out the sound, and those strings aren’t incidental — every seventh Longboat album incorporates them, a self-imposed rule that started as a creative constraint and has quietly become one of the project’s most distinctive threads. What might have felt arbitrary at first has turned into something Keller clearly leans into, using the orchestral layer to push the music somewhere it couldn’t go otherwise.
The record was tracked and mixed at Studio Litho by Floyd Reitsma, with Ed Brooks handling mastering at Resonant Mastering. The production is clean and detailed without feeling overworked — the kind of finish that lets the arrangement breathe.
Album 35 moves through past, present, and future — the orchestral arrangements doing a lot of the narrative heavy lifting, with electronic production holding it all together. That tension between structure and experimentation is pretty much the Longboat signature at this point, and it sounds like this record leans into it more deliberately than most. The strings give the album a cinematic quality, but the electronic backbone keeps it grounded in something immediate and physical.
Igor Keller has put out more than 30 albums under the name, moving from jazz saxophone to film scoring to experimental pop over the years without ever really settling. That kind of output could easily tip into formula, but Longboat has stayed interesting precisely because Longboat keeps introducing new constraints, new concepts, new angles to work from. The every-seventh-album string tradition is one example. The consistent use of narrative framing — turning an album into something with a point of view rather than just a collection of tracks — is another.
Recent releases like Word Gets Around, The Merry Blacksmith’s Song Bucket, and Absentia kept that momentum going, each one distinct in tone while still feeling unmistakably like Longboat. Album 35 looks to continue that run. “Holiday on Saturn” sets the table — a track that’s playful on the surface and tightly constructed underneath, which is about as good a summary of what this project does as you’re going to find in a single song.