Eric Hilton – The Easy Underground LP – Montserrat House

“I’m intrigued by music that can exist both in the foreground and the background, you just put it on and let it vibe and seep in, in its own way. But if you listen very intently, off in your own little world – you’ll get a lot out of it. And that’s a world I call The Easy Underground….” – Eric Hilton

The Easy Underground, Eric Hilton’s stunning new studio album, out November 20th on Monserrat House Records, spirits listeners away to a breezily romantic world of whispered promises and slow-burned deep kisses. Hilton has spent decades architecting these types of sounds as a co-founder of the legendary downtempo electronic combo Thievery Corporation, and across a growing catalog of solo artist releases with flavors of ambient, space groove, acid jazz, and of course trip-hop. But for The Easy Underground, Hilton is reconstituting a genre outside his usual orbit – easy listening.

“No one really thinks of easy listening music as “underground” but I do,” says the producer. “Throughout the years of collecting, DJ’ing and curating music for Eighteenth Street Lounge and other spots, I always found the oddball stuff like soundtrack and easy listening records had something interesting about it. It was hard to find, a lot in those genres could be schlocky or corny. Rarely, I’d dig and find a record that was exotic and otherworldly; special. And I made The Easy Underground with that idea, and that spirit,” said Hilton.

Joining Hilton for this project is longtime musical compadre Natalia Clavier, who sings on 9 of the album’s thirteen tracks, in multiple languages. Fans of Thievery Corporation’s 2013 album Saudade will find The Easy Underground tonally adjacent, with flavors of bossa nova, Brazilian rhythms and female vocals present on both. But while the two records share some common ingredients, Hilton’s solo recipe has deeper grooves, more space, and isn’t following an established blueprint. He’s taking the easy listening thing and pulling it into the underground.

“Easy listening is a very broad category, I think; it’s really not even used as a musical category anymore, but like Sade is technically easy listening,” asserts Hilton. “You know, all of her catalog as well as Avalon by Roxy Music, and a lot of Bryan Ferry’s later solo work. All those records are so smooth, such a great listen, but there’s something smart and challenging about them too, in the songwriting, the playing and the production. I like making music that’s adjacent to that,” says the producer. “I could rock trip-hop records all day every day, I could do it in my sleep. But making a record like The Easy Underground is more challenging to me. I know I’m kind of scratching my own itch making a record like this, but I think if people come along and listen with me, they’ll get where it’s coming from.”

Hilton did not envision The Easy Underground as a largely vocal album. Initially it began with instrumental tracks; “Soft Focus” (which sounds a bit like a track from Moon Safari, if Air was a Brazilian act, not French) as well as the propulsive title track “Alma Boa.” But as Hilton explains, “At some point I worked with Natalia on a couple songs that I wrote, “Promise Me” and “Innocent Eyes,” and I started to rethink things, because in the beginning I thought it might be an instrumental record. I had a couple of nice work in progress Bossa tunes, and a musical sketch for “Caminhos” , which I felt needed some kind of vocal on it. So, then I started leaning towards singers, and frankly, Natalia was knocking it out of the park on so many songs that I just thought, well, I’m just going to go with this.”

Clavier’s years long tenure performing live and recording with Thievery Corporation established her chameleon-like ability to change vocals styles, language, inflection, intensity – anything a given song required. And such is the case with her performances on The Easy Underground.

“She always gets the vibe of what I’m doing, singing in multiple languages as she does in such a great way; but intriguingly, she sounded like a different person on every song. She sounds like one person on “Promise Me” and another person on “Alma Boa”, the lead song. She versatility is such a benefit to this record. I actually was going to include a couple songs with other singers, but they just sounded out of place,” Hilton relates.

“Look What You’ve Done” is a great example of Clavier’s strengths, delivering a blend of desire and desperation not unlike Portishead’s Beth Gibbons, but with decidedly less pathos (this is an easy listening record after all – kind of.) “Innocent Eyes” is almost bluesy, until the sitar and strings drift in. “Mi Buenos Aires” is perhaps the album’s most traditional/ sounding track, and very personal to Clavier, the lyric professing love for her native land:

“My Buenos Aires

Dreaming of coming home to your landscape

Childhood Sundays and the fig tree

Grandmother’s loving hands

It is springtime, smelling of jasmine

Returning to you, returning to your streets”

The album closer “Vai Chegar” shakes like the ruffles on a samba dress, but Clavier’s vocal floats through the movement and provides the “easy”. Four instrumentals are sprinkled throughout the track listing, “Silent Samba” and “Brooklyn Sicilians” joining the aforementioned “Soft Focus” and the title track, “The Easy Underground”. The instruments serve as palate cleansers in a way, the lack of vocal requiring less attention from the listener – that is, unless you want to listen intently to them, and then these tracks too, take you somewhere.

Make listening easy on yourself – ascend with Eric Hilton into The Easy Underground, out November 20th 2026 on Monserrat House, vinyl, CD and digital.

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