Electronic Press Kit

Tom Foden

Debut solo album · 11 July 2026 · Five Thousand Sound Studio, Te Awa Kairangi, Aotearoa

About the album

Sonic journal entries of a man working to release the innocence and joy of his young self.

{...r e l e a s e...} is a 13-track debut solo album from Wellington-based producer and musician Tom Foden, out 11 July 2026.

The album documents a journey through and beyond depression — not by treating it as an illness to overcome, but by honouring it as a necessary companion: something that held the young Tom when nothing else could, and that he has spent years learning to release with gratitude. At its centre is {...h e l d...}, a song about the relationship between a child and the suffering that kept him stable when his world was not.

Sonically, {...r e l e a s e...} moves between electronic texture and intimate song, between field recording and engineered sound, between the improvised and the obsessively constructed. Influences range from Nightmares on Wax and The Range to Oneohtrix Point Never and Aphex Twin — but the record sits in its own space. Personal, purposeful, and entirely DIY.

{...r e l e a s e...} is available on Bandcamp and SoundCloud. No DSP release. A considered, values-led decision.

About Tom Foden

Tom Foden is an artist, producer, engineer and musician based in Lower Hutt, Aotearoa — born in London, raised in Perth.

He came to music production through an unlikely route: 20+ years in live event production, where he developed the project management, technical rigour and creative problem-solving that now define his studio practice. Two years ago he made the leap — leaving a senior career in events to build something truer to him. {...r e l e a s e...} is the first public statement of that.

As a young man in Perth, Tom played in influential underground bands and live electronic acts before life led elsewhere. He returned to bass and production in his forties — not as a hobby, but as a necessity. Music, it turned out, was a wellbeing imperative he had been postponing.

His studio work reflects this. Almost every artist he has worked with carries some element of healing in their process — emerging artists finding their voice, older artists returning to music for the first time in decades, people using songwriting to work through grief, transition or trauma. Tom is drawn to this intersection of music and purpose, and builds his practice around it.

He works across electronic, hip hop, indie and experimental music. He is a generalist who knows when to call in specialists — and a collaborator who believes the producer’s job is to serve the music, not the producer’s ego.

His affinity for te ao Māori is a considered one — a way of working and being that resists the cultural dominance of colonial, capitalist defaults, and that offers a worldview capable of guiding people back to themselves, each other, and the natural world.

Tom is currently taking on new production and mixing clients. He is particularly interested in artists exploring sound, songwriting and storytelling on a deep personal level.

Listen

Selected tracks for press:

Track listing

Credits