Dutch duo WAAN return with their sophomore album We Want WAAN, a genre-defying exploration of rhythm, improvisation, and emotion out January 23, 2026 on Sonar Kollektiv.

Following the critical acclaim of their 2023 debut Echo Echo which earned two Edison Award nominations and strong support from press and radio (including BBC Radio 2s Jamie Cullum) saxophonist Bart Wirtz and keyboardist Emiel van Rijthoven push their musical conversation further on We Want WAAN. What emerges is a deeply textured, cinematic album that fuses jazz, electronics, and beat culture with raw emotional clarity.

The albums creative spark was ignited on the remote Dutch island of Texel, where the pair retreated in summer 2024 to write freely unburdened by format, genre, or expectation. Whatever the track needs, we give it, WAAN explains. That simple principle opened the door to sweeping strings, broken time signatures, crowd recordings, and boundary-pushing collaborations.

A key moment arrives with Been Blue, a striking fusion of jazz and hip-hop featuring Philadelphia rapper, singer, and producer Ivy Sole a powerful voice in the global non-binary music movement. Known for their poetic lyricism and emotional nuance, Sole brings a defiant vulnerability to the track, touching on grief, identity, and resistance. The result is one of the albums most affecting and genre-transcending moments.

From the meditative opening of We Want WAAN to the rhythm-forward intensity of Mirrors and Lodge Texas, the album balances intricacy with soul. Tracks like Talking Trees and In Doubt drift into melancholic trip-hop, while Moto No Oto and In Dreams lean into ambient jazz textures.

The album was produced in collaboration with Oscar de Jong (Kraak & Smaak), it reflects the tension and beauty of WAANs musical identity: one foot in the jazz tradition, the other deep in a future-facing, improvisational sound world.