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It was late. Four in the morning or something like that. Lev Ceylan stared out of the window and hit play again and again. “,” sang a beautiful voice, haunted and vulnerable in the dead air. He felt like it was talking only to him. “The lyrics resonated so much,” the producer tells of ‘Remedy’, a song that now beats like the slow-burn synth-pop heart of ’s debut album ‘Shallow Hits’.
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Now and then I can tune out all the noise / But it comes back and it follows me
As Ceylan speaks, vocalist Will Rowland nods thoughtfully in a parallel Zoom window. He didn’t write those words for his bandmate – he wrote them for himself. But he is beginning to understand his own capacity to hit people where it hurts, knowing that they’re seeing something of themselves reflected in his lyrics about anxiety, low self-esteem and interpersonal relationships in a cold, dislocated world. “There is a power in externalising your internal monologue,” Rowland says. “It’s like, this is how I feel – do you feel like that too? I suppose that’s what a lot of lyrics are meant to do, right? But it’s quite a punishing voice.”
Ebbb on The Cover of NME. Credit: Ed Miles for NME
It is, but through Ebbb’s music he has found a constructive way to respond to its constant needling. Completed by Scott MacDonald, whose move from live drummer to full-time member has reconfigured their sound into something more tactile and dynamic, the London trio have a lot going for them. Tipped in the NME 100 of 2025, Ebbb have hooks for miles, a complementary sense of formal adventure and virtuosic musical chops that have already secured them a deal with Ninja Tune, home to Bonobo, Kae Tempest and Thundercat, and a hand-picked support slot with Radiohead offshoot The Smile.
But it’s their ability to turn Rowland’s lacerating, intensely personal lyrics into communal gatherings live, dialling up that early-hours emotional weight so that it chimes with hundreds of people at once, that really sets them apart. “The songs, from my point of view, always start off as this very private, introspective act,” Rowland says. “I’ll sit in my room and write lyrics over a period of time, really craft them. Then there is this purging when it gets brought to the stage. I love that dissonance between the euphoric production and the internal lyrical voice.”
Lev Cylan of Ebbb. Credit: Ed Miles for NME
Coming up alongside the fizzing Brixton Windmill scene, which earlier spawned Black Country, New Road, Black Midi and Squid, Ebbb initially forged a rep as a sense-shattering live band, with MacDonald’s dexterous playing clattering into Ceylan’s chaotically rhythmic synths. Rowland, a former chorister, uses his voice as both a melodic scalpel blade and a textural element, his plaintive cries meeting tiered harmonies and moments of catharsis. Meanwhile, his lyrics smuggle gut-punches into songs that are otherwise primed for club-wide bliss outs.
We live in a time when bands are expected to be social media account managers first and musicians second, shovelling snappy content into the algorithm’s gaping maw. Ebbb have eschewed that grind in favour of something more traditional, deciding early on that they’d do the bare minimum online and instead rely on their performances as a calling card, using word of mouth to create a more organic sort of buzz. “When we started the band, we were sitting at mine like, ‘We don’t want to do social media,’” Ceylan recalls. “We were just gonna post the gigs in our stories. People have 24 hours to be part of it, or not.”
“I love that dissonance between the euphoric production and the internal lyrical voice” – Will Rowland
Quickly, they found that the vibrancy of each show and those short-notice posts generated a sense of curiosity and momentum. As their profile grew, they formulated a sound that they’d eventually describe as “Brian Wilson meets Death Grips”. It was a label that felt apropos on their 2024 debut EP ‘All At Once’, which housed churning, gnarly drum machines alongside Rowland’s spectral vocals. Now, it feels somewhat reductive. “We probably said that once or twice after a show when someone asked us how we would describe it,” Ceylan notes. “It was a very vague way of expressing extremes.”
There is nothing vague about the band Ebbb have become. Beyond the detail in their sound, from the warmth and humanity of MacDonald’s drums to Rowland’s lattice-like vocal arrangements, their writing is informed by rich, idiosyncratic personal histories that they have somehow managed to slot together, the joins barely visible. As a result, they are making pop music that is wired differently. “It wasn’t until I started doing sessions as a producer that [I realised] I can’t put a gabber beat in a verse,” Ceylan admits. “I’m kind of learning backwards.”
Will Rowland of Ebbb. Credit: Ed Miles for NME
At home in Germany, music wasn’t really a thing – he estimates he was 16 when he first heard an album front to back – but Ceylan became enamoured with rock and metal through his desire to play guitar, which grew after seeing a friend pick one up. He later got a job at the Philharmonic Hall in Munich as a technician, feeling his horizons being forcibly broadened by the sights and sounds he witnessed each night. “In my spare time, I would have all the crazy metal stuff, but then at work it would be opera, jazz, world music, classical,” he observes.
In London, meanwhile, Rowland was being educated at Westminster Abbey Choir School, receiving classical training and essentially foregoing pop until his teenage years, when the heavyweights of mainstream indie – Tame Impala, The Strokes, Foals et al – came knocking and set him on a path towards more esoteric guitar realms. “Then it was a lot of dream-pop, bands like Pale Saints, and chamber-pop like Belle & Sebastian,” he says. “I was very inspired by The Beach Boys, which was a big one for me. ‘Pet Sounds’ was one of my favourite albums.”
“There was a big aspect of getting these ideas together without it being too avant-garde” – Lev Ceylan
Their paths began to converge when Ceylan moved over to study at Goldsmiths. There, he met MacDonald, whose drumming developed in the scuzzy surroundings of the Glasgow punk scene, and discovered electronica and hip-hop as he whiled away the pandemic’s sterile hours. “When I had the opportunity to get into production, there was almost this feeling of finding treasure,” Ceylan says. “Like, ‘Oh my god, I can mix orchestral samples with ambient electronica?’”
Rowland was thrown into the mix following a chance meeting at a show, and they soon found common ground in their rapidly developing tastes, from the melodic riddles of Cocteau Twins to Broadcast’s deconstructed psych experiments. “There have been multiple moments when we were on flights, all listening to Broadcast and timing it with takeoff,” Ceylan says.
Between these poles, Ebbb’s treatment of Rowland’s otherworldly voice makes perfect sense. At first, it appears that they take perverse delight in corrupting something beautiful, spotlighting its pristine appearance only to assault it from all sides with maximalist splurges of noise. But it is this very dynamic that makes their take on straight-up pop writing so compelling.
Scott MacDonald of Ebbb. Credit: Ed Miles for NME
Splitting the difference between Everything Everything and imperial-phase Years & Years, it is easy to imagine latest single ‘Side On’ as a genuine chart-bothering concern. But its indelible hook emerges from a tangle of multi-tracked voices, sitting atop a skittering drum’n’bass beat. “Then all your dreams turn into dust,” Rowland sings, reaching for a moment of perfect, celebratory melancholy. “There was a big aspect of getting these ideas together without it being too avant-garde,” Ceylan says. “It’s easy, once you put a drum’n’bass instrumental over choral vocals, to go too far and make music that only works in your head.”
At their best, Ebbb blow this concept wide open. ‘Home Ground’ is nominally a song that’s all the way in its own head as Rowland lays out his many regrets – the things he said and did, and what you think of him after last night – amid a complex knot of warped vocals, floating overdubs and multisyllabic percussion. But when they arrive at its ecstatic chorus, it’s transportive. You’re on a dancefloor, eyes closed as tomorrow is kept at bay. “That song is purely about post-social anxiety,” he says. “I guess one of the reasons why you write lyrics is to try and overcome it and move on.”
Credit: Ed Miles for NME
The pace that Ebbb work at certainly helps in that regard. If Rowland is feeling ruminative, time is never on his side. Dig up interviews from a couple of years ago, and you’ll find the band talking about having a record out by the end of 2024. They could have done that – they had plenty of songs – but they were evolving at such a clip that each new idea shoved an old one to the back of the line, the hopes and fears in each verse going with them. “We’ve always been prolific,” Rowland says. “We write a lot and things quickly change in terms of what becomes the priority. We feel like we’ve outdone ourselves by writing something new.”
That ‘Shallow Hits’ made the cut as a cohesive unit speaks to its quality, but it’s not entirely shielded from the unpredictability of Ebbb’s restless creative process. They plan to start populating their set with new songs in the not-too-distant future, almost working one record ahead when playing live as they seek to preserve the artistic drive that’s got them to this point. “We’ve always had a very quick turnover of what’s in the live set, because we get very excited about a specific idea,” Rowland says. “Then we’re like, ‘We’ve got to play this.’ In the early days before we’d released anything, it didn’t really matter what we played – we were constantly experimenting with different stuff, which was all part of the joy of it.”
For Ebbb, the relentless pursuit of that joy is part of their method. But, for us, it offers a chance to experience the buzz over and over again, like we’re the first ones through the door at a show that might change how we feel, that might make us feel less alone.
Ebbb’s ‘Shallow Hits’ is out on July 10 via Ninja Tune.
Listen to Ebbb’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Huw Baines
Photography: Eddie Miles
Label: Ninja Tune
