10 Neo-Balearic Records That Bring Back Summer

Sundown soundtracks and atmospherical ambient

In the late 1970s, a young Argentinian DJ, music journalist and concert promoter named Alfredo Fiorito arrived in Ibiza with his girlfriend.

“The first impression I had of the island was one of total freedom. There was no industry, everyone was a painter, a writer, a designer. I liked that place so much that I decided to stay and started selling candles and clothes to make a living…”¹

Obviously, this was long before the Mediterranean island turned into the commercial dance music mecca that it is today.

At the time, Ibiza was still “a refuge for artists, bohemians, hippies, and outsiders fleeing repressive regimes or breaking away from conventional society. It was a place of experimentation and artistic freedom, where music became the soundtrack of a new way of life.”

We are now calling that soundtrack Balearic Beat.

To be clear, Balearic Beat is not a music genre, but an aesthetic rooted in DJ Alfredo’s sets at Club Amnesia. He played an eclectic, psychedelic blend of genres – Italo disco and Spanish guitar, new wave and synth pop, jazz-funk and reggae, ambient and early house music.

Vacationing on the island in 1987, a bunch of British DJs around Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling were so enchanted by Alfredo’s idiosyncratic selections that they started spreading the Balearic gospel in the UK and mainland Europe.²

In 1991, the late producer and DJ José Padilla began soundtracking the breathtaking sundowns at Café del Mar, expanding Balearic Beat to ambient house, trip-hop and downtempo. His sound vision was captured on the popular chill-out compilation series named after the venue.

While dance music in general and Ibiza in particular have gone through endless stages of commercialization and gentrification since those early days, the idea of Balearic Beat translated into a set of aesthetic production values that has proven surprisingly durable.

When

Philip Sherburne

declared 2015 the year of the ‘Balearic revival’, he was talking about the resurgence of this music’s markers within the electronic music community – driven by DJs and producers like Young Marco, Ruf Dug and Mark Barrott, labels like Permanent Vacation, International Feel and Music For Dreams, and music blogs like Test Pressing and Music Is My Sanctuary.

Pleasure Voyage, Bandcamp profile image

Roughly in the same time period, maybe two or three years prior to the start of the Balearic revival, the vaporwave movement generally stirred up the notion of what was deemed acceptable in the electronic music world.

Vaporwave enabled a semi-ironic appreciation of sweet, soothing sounds that had been ignored or even frowned upon by music snobs for decades: Smooth jazz and yacht rock, city pop and lounge muzak, kosmische and esoteric new age. This resurgence was driven by irony and iconoclasm, but it also reflected a serious yearning, a nostalgia for pre-internet culture and the optimistic, artificial sounds of 1980s futurism.

With vaporwave opening up producers’ and listeners’ tastes, Balearic production values found their way back into contemporary electronic music. Earlier, rawer styles of dance music came back, like Italo disco and new beat, and that trend was reflected in the so-called ‘lo-fi house’ movement.

In my recent post on the Japanese vaporwave/house producer Soshi Takeda, I’ve used the term ‘neo-Balearic’ to describe a blissed-out subset of house and ambient productions, roughly from the last decade (2015-2025).

Today I want to recommend a few great examples of that style, which – in all its different variations – has remained one of my favorite strains of electronic music throughout the last decade.

Pleasure Voyage – Postcards From Eden (2025)

This brand new release on Bay Area ambient label Constellation Tatsu remains on heavy rotation here at Casa Kunze. Pleasure Voyage are a Hungarian duo who were discovered by Norwegian DJ and producer Prins Thomas and who’ve had several great downtempo and house releases since 2020.

The aptly titled Postcards From Eden has it all: Jazzy Fender Rhodes chords, synth basslines, airy percussion and saturated 4/4 beats grooving along in a smooth poolside disco tempo around 120 bpm. The atmosphere of the music evokes hazy images of summer coastline hikes, or bike cruises along blossoming canola fields. Summer might be over, but our memories stay forever.

Space Ghost – Private Paradise (Pacific Rhythm, 2022)

This Oakland-based producer’s version of house music is shaped by strong Westcoast funk and boogie influences. Private Paradise was inspired by a post-pandemic trip to a Northern Californian coast resort that “he and his partner visited to refresh their spirit and regain optimism and enthusiasm for the outside world.”

It feels apt that Private Paradise isn’t so much a dance album but a collection of eight weightless tunes of which only two actually feature a mid-tempo 4/4 beat. The rest remains beatless, a bunch of ambient tunes based on a sound palette reminscent of these blissful new age cassettes that you would find in Californian health food stores next to healing crystals and incense sticks.

Pacific Coliseum – Ocean City (Coastal Haze, 2017)

Vancouver, right at the ‘Canadian riviera’, is known as a capital of neo-Balearic music. Local producer Jamison Isaak has been making music since the early 2010s under various aliases: Teen Daze for melancholic indie pop, Two Bicycles for contemplative folk, and Pacific Coliseum for sun-drenched house beats.

His first LP under that last moniker, Ocean City, came out right at the height of the mid-2010s Balearic revival. Bookended by two pieces of dreamy ambient, the album moves from colourful, groovy nu-disco tunes to downtempo affairs with programmed drum machine beats, analog synths and gentle electric guitar. At this point, I’m inclined to call this a modern classic of the genre – and his subsequent albums were great too, including his most recent one from 2025, Voice Wave.

Mogwaa – Del Mar (MM Discos, 2022)

A trained classical pianist and guitarist, this prolific South Korean producer and studio-owner has been focusing on painstakingly recreating various styles of old school electronic music. Since his debut release in 2017, he’s been making amazing house, boogie, downtempo and ambient records – he’s truly mastered all those styles by deeply analyzing each one’s characteristics, structures and instrumentation.

Del Mar combines Balearic textures with pop-schooled songcraft, creating a rich sound world of digital panflutes and analog synth basslines, bossa rhythms and electro bleeps, reggae offbeats and 1980s drum machine sounds. Mogwaa’s Latin-inspired follow-up for the Berlin/Barcelona-based MM Discos label, Hazy Dreams, is highly recommended listening as well.

Nu Genea – Bar Mediterraneo (NG, 2022)

I loved this Italian producer duo’s first album Nuova Napoli, an organic take on boogie and jazz-funk through an uniquely Mediterranean lens. But their second album really blew it out the water with its mix of instrumental and vocal tunes, Tunisian dialect and Neapolitan language, afrobeat rhythms and folky mandolin riffs, analog synths and disco strings. Infectiously funky and totally danceable, but melodic and laid-back enough to work as home listening ambience.

Their 2025 single “Sciallà” is another real belter.

Manuel Darquart – Birds Of Paradiso (Childsplay, 2017)

This is an early five-tracker from Auckland/London-based DJ and producer Louis Anderson-Rich, who has been responsible for some of the most infectious neo-Balearica of the past decade. The music is definitely on the more house-y end of this list. I don’t know much else about him or the EP, but I do love this evocative Bandcamp blurb:

ur 5 day holiday is coming 2 a heartbreaking end on the magnifique isle of paradiso. as u wait on the pier 4 ur last rendez-vous w/ that special sum1, ur holiday romance is nowhere 2 b seen. all that’s left is the memory of shared cherry vanilla slushies, inflatable flamingo races, and the vibes… vibes that have been conveniently pressed onto the latest slab of wax by ur friends @ childsplay 2 remedy ur post summer-luv blues <3 <3 don’t let autumn get u down, get down 2 manuel instead xo

Mark Barrott – Sketches From An Island 2 (International Feel, 2016)

Hailing from Sheffield, DJ and producer Mark Barrott was making ambient jungle in the 1990s under the moniker Future Loop Foundation and later pivoted to downtempo music in the vein of Kruder & Dorfmeister. After moving to Ibiza in 2012, he felt inspired by his new natural surroundings and went on to create two volumes of Sketches From An Island and the album Nature Sounds of the Balearics.

My favorite of the trilogy remains the blissful Sketches From An Island 2. This is more an ambient than a dance album, starting out with some summery downbeat cuts, then moving into eclectic chill-out stuff – Berlin school electronics, solo piano and marimba minimalism – in the second half. Inspiration stems from the fringes of Balearic DJ culture, from Swiss new age harpist Andreas Vollenweider to ambient piano master Harold Budd. The essence of instrumental island music, conjured on nothing but a slide guitar and a MIDI keyboard.

Mr Fingers – Cerebral Hemispheres [Disc 1] (Alleviated, 2018)

I was once strolling through the aisles of Soho’s famous Sounds of the Universe record store when I shazam’ed the gorgeous downtempo cut “Urbane Sunset”, delighted to find out the Chicago deep house legend Larry Heard had just released a new double album under his Mr Fingers moniker. Of course I bought the record right away, and I wasn’t disappointed at all.

The first disc is a classic deep house record in the vein of his legendary 1990s albums (think Sceneries not Songs or Genesis) with a strong Balearic flavour (just check examples “Sands of Aruba” or “A Day in Portugal”), while the second disc dives deeper into his electro and techno influences. Both are outstanding, making this one of the best electronic music albums of the past decade and Heard’s late opus magnum; but for the purpose of this list, it’s really the first disc that captures that peak summer island flavour.

Jack J – Opening The Door (Mood Hut, 2022)

Vancouver’s Jack Jutson was one of the original pioneers of the lo-fi house scene – both of his early 12-inches on the Mood Hut label are quite seminal for that style. What’s interesting is that Jutson didn’t actually set out to make house music; he was much more inspired by early 1980s Brit-funk groups like Atmosfear – music that definitely fits the DJ Alfredo canon as well.

After a seven year break from releasing solo music, Jutson came back with this beautiful slab of hazy pop-house, recorded over the course of several years leading up to the pandemic. He’d clearly developed his sound further, from making instrumental dance tracks into writing laid-back, soulful songs that referenced “inward-peering ambient jazz, On-U-inspired digital dub and quiet storm soft rock leaving a distinct sense of sadness amongst all the tangerine funk.” Now what could actually be more Balearic than that description?

Chaos In The CBD – A Deeper Life (In Dust We Trust, 2025)

Chaos In The CBD are a brotherly DJ and production duo from New Zealand. They’re globally renowned for finding a sweet spot between deep house and dub techno, refining that sound over a series of a dozen EPs since 2012. After touring the world successfully for a decade, their debut album arrived in May 2025, marking a clear depart from their previous, mainly dancefloor-oriented work.

Described by the brothers as an “ode to a slower pace of life”, they crafted 14 laid-back house, downtempo and ambient tunes based on programmed beats, live instrumentation and even a few vocal features, my favorite being the throwback vibes of “Maintaining My Peace” with grime rapper Novelist and R&B singer Stephanie Cooke. Their love for island sounds is rooted in their upbringing in New Zealand’s calm countryside: “In its own way, New Zealand is incredibly Balearic, but without the party side”, says Ben Helliker-Hales of the now London-based duo. One of this year’s most ambitious Balearic releases.

1. quoted from the liner notes for the new compilation Paraíso. The True Spirit Of Ibiza

2. If you want to go deep on its history and evolution, Kristan J. Carly traces the Balearic sound back in a well-written recent story for DJ Mag.