Brakence ends his silence with marroW

Update, October 23: marroW is out now on Columbia. The album runs 18 tracks, and six of them came out ahead of it: "ready or noT," "crystallized," "death rolL," "Problem Child," "bitE" and "body." One of the new songs is called "jesteR," the same name the Still Here site gave its audio file in September.

Brakence is back. His new album, marroW, came out October 23 on Columbia Records. It is his first album since 2022.

It started with a site called Still Here, which went up in mid-September at still-here.world. Columbia Records, the artist's label, built it, and at the time it was the clearest signal in years that new music was coming.

The page was almost nothing, and that was on purpose. Black screen. An open wooden door that opens onto a red velvet room. One button. Press it and a clip played, twenty-five seconds long, then it stopped. No date, no title, no tracklist, no link to save anything. The metadata named Brakence and Columbia, and the footer read Sony Music Entertainment, so this was official, not a fan build.

That mattered because Brakence had gone quiet. Randall Findell, who records as Brakence, is from Columbus, Ohio, and he became one of the names people used to explain where hyperpop was heading. His 2022 album hypochondriac was a record younger producers studied and learned the sound from. Then he mostly stepped back. That album was his last solo release. Since then he showed up only on other people's songs: "A La Carte" with Quadeca in 2023, two tracks on Colliding With Mars' Time to Meet God in 2024, and Aries' "Sleepwalker" in 2025.

For a while it had the shape of a familiar story. An artist becomes central to a sound, carries a wave, and is gone before the run feels finished.

The clearest version of that story is Shiloh Dynasty, and the timing is hard to miss. It has been ten years since she last posted. Her final message, in September 2016, was a short clip captioned "Come here." Then she was gone.

She left behind barely ten minutes of released audio, most of it short clips she sang into Vine and Instagram, with a few songs on SoundCloud. It was enough. Producers started sampling her around 2015, and her voice became the backbone of lofi and chillhop. Potsu's flip of her landed on three songs on XXXTentacion's 17. Young Thug used her on "Climax." Juice WRLD used her on "Run." For years people thought she had died, until her former management debunked the rumor in 2019 and said she was simply private, that she wanted privacy more than fame. She never came back.

Brakence is not Shiloh Dynasty, and the details are different. But the fear was the same. Someone who mattered to a sound went dark, and fans were left guessing whether the best of it had already happened, and whether they would hear from him again.

Still Here answered part of that. The name was the point. Fans found the page within hours and started pulling it apart on Reddit. The audio was short and gave little away, though the site's own code labeled the file "jester."

Then the music came. "ready or noT" landed on Friday, September 25, the date he had announced in an Instagram reel, with a video directed and edited by Quadeca. Four days later Brakence named the album and laid out the rest of the schedule.

marroW runs 18 tracks. "crystallized" and "death rolL" came out October 2, "Problem Child" on October 9, and "bitE" and "body" on October 16, a week before the full album.

marroW is streaming now at brakence.lnk.to/marroW. Still Here is at still-here.world.