2026 Repress After a dizzying 2020 run that produced three albums in twelve months, Błoto disappeared back into the soil: touring, splinter projects, other bands, and the slow work of letting new ideas ferment. More than three years later, those ideas surface as Grzybnia (“Mycelium”), the quartet’s fourth LP and their most fully crystallised statement so far. Recorded in early 2023 at Warsaw’s Studio Pasterka under the careful ear of producer Piotr Zabrodzki, the sessions were the most fruitful in the group’s history, yielding not only the album itself but two advance singles (“Szlam / Ścieki” and “Bakteria”) and enough material for a follow‑up EP due next year.
Where 2021’s Kwasy i zasady (“Acids and Bases”) used chemistry as a metaphor for human traits that corrode harmony and mirrored a polarised 21st‑century society, Grzybnia goes a step further. Its central image is the fungal network that lives beneath the forest floor: a hidden mesh of filaments that connects trees, shares nutrients and thrives precisely in damaged, human‑altered environments. For Błoto, mycelium becomes a model of cooperation as both survival strategy and creative method. It acknowledges that collaboration can yield good and bad fruit - mushrooms, medicines, poisons - but insists that the collective act itself is where power lies.
The music embodies this metaphor at every turn. Latarnik, Cancer G, Wuja HZG and OlafSaxx improvise as if they were one organism: drums slip between broken‑beat hip‑hop and four‑to‑the‑floor throb, bass lines root the harmony while nudging grooves toward house or techno, keys and electronics smear dubby textures across the stereo field, and saxophone threads through it all, sometimes as lead voice, sometimes as another strand in the hum. Tracks like “Łysiczka”, “Kozak” or “Shiitake” build from sparse rhythmic cells into densely interwoven structures, their contours less like songs than like clusters of growth. The band’s grounding in nu‑jazz and hip‑hop is unmistakable, but on Grzybnia those roots feed an increasingly hybrid canopy: jazz phrasing over club sub‑bass, free‑ish horn flares inside loop‑driven patterns, live improvisation treated with a producer’s sense of tension and release.
Conceptually, the record positions Błoto as both product and destructor of culture. As one label text puts it, the band “belongs to the underground realm” and behaves like mycelium in another sense: it decomposes existing musical forms and recombines them into new ones. Samples, idioms and scene signals from jazz, house, techno and beat‑culture are ingested, broken down and re‑emerge as something harder to categorise but immediately recognisable as the group’s own. The idea that a single mushroom dies while its mycelium endures becomes an analogue for how individual bands, tracks and scenes fade while the deeper network of influences and collaborations persists.
The release is also keyed to the Polish calendar: peak mushroom season is autumn, which is why Grzybnia lands then via Astigmatic Records, in a limited vinyl run of 500 copies mixed and mastered by Kwazar and visually framed by Sainer’s artwork. It has already drawn strong critical response, earning, among other honours, a Fryderyk 2025 nomination in the Alternative Music category and being hailed as the year’s standout in the broader EABS‑related universe. But the record wears its accolades lightly. At heart, Grzybnia is a utopian proposal smuggled inside a heavy, head‑nodding, club‑ready jazz record: what if our musical and social worlds behaved more like mycelium - decentralised, mutually sustaining, able to regenerate even in degraded conditions? For forty minutes, Błoto make that ecosystem feel not just plausible, but vividly audible.
