Jennifer Loveless debut album Familiar lands on Running Back Incantations on 9 October: seven tracks, 37 minutes, and a record that asks what happens when you return to a version of yourself you thought you’d outgrown.
Loveless, who is Toronto-born and now Berlin-based, has spent the better part of her career moving between registers, the turbo-charged and the tender, the floor-levelling and the introspective. Familiar pulls those threads into a single, cohesive statement. According to Beatportal, Loveless is also a member of the Beatport Next Class of 2026, a designation that arrives at an apt moment: the debut album is the kind of work that tends to clarify exactly who an artist is, and Familiar seems built for that purpose.
What Jennifer Loveless Debut Album Familiar Is About
The record is a meditation on time, memory and the unsettling experience of revisiting people, places and feelings that have quietly shifted since you last encountered them. Loveless describes it in three words: honest, visceral, contemplative. It is designed to be heard in a single sitting, beginning to end, which is a curatorial choice that feels deliberate rather than precious, the seven tracks move through emotional terrain that rewards patience. Running at 37 minutes, per Apple Music, there is no filler, no padding between ideas. The album is accompanied by a series of poems written alongside the music, extending the record’s themes into a second register entirely.
When asked to name a favourite track, Loveless declined the question on its own terms. ‘I was listening to this again, top to bottom, to answer this question, and I wasn’t really able to pick,’ she said. ‘But I do think it’s best listened to in one sitting, all the way through.’ The track she would play to a first-time listener is SSK4. What she hopes that listener feels, having made it from start to finish, is a single word: free.
A Discography Built Across Continents
Familiar is not the work of an artist arriving without context. Loveless’s discography already spans releases on Sex Tags UFO, Planet Euphorique, Butter Sessions and AUS Music, a spread that maps the breadth of her sensibility as well as any biography could. Her DJ sets have carried her through Dekmantel, Sónar, Panorama Bar and Fabric, among others, and her summer this year included a first visit to Gottwood, a return to the On Loop stage at Gala, and further appearances at Dekmantel and Lost Village.
The sets themselves are their own argument. She threads speedy techno against acid house, laces in samples from unexpected corners, and makes the results feel inevitable rather than eccentric. One Sydney crowd heard her spin a remix of the Vengaboys’ ‘We Like to Party (The Vengabus)’, a detail that is either the punchline or the point, depending on how seriously you take the idea that a great DJ set has no fixed emotional register.
Asked which city or floor reliably draws out her best work, Loveless admitted she has no formula. ‘I am fortunate enough to be surprised by my best sets coming out in a variety of scenarios,’ she said. There is something in that answer that speaks to the same quality as the album: an openness to what a given moment might produce, rather than a performance mapped against expectation.
Off the decks, she is most likely to be found in a body of water, buried in a book, or on the sofa with her girlfriend and cat. The track she has been playing obsessively: Kelela’s ‘If We Meet Again’. The rider: coconut water, bananas, lime, soda water, tequila gold and, should the mood call for it, a bottle of natural wine.
First records that made her want to DJ and produce: Lady Blacktronika’s ‘Never Everything’ and Caribou’s ‘Our Love’. The Jennifer Loveless debut album Familiar releases on 9 October via Running Back Incantations.
