the new single “Stumbling” from electronic musical duo UNTER STRØM via renegade label Breathing Records. Led by Alex Gonzales (Matte Blvck) and John Kunkel (The New Division, John Grand), UNTER STRØM was born from a shared obsession: pushing the boundaries of techno, melodic house, and industrial sonics into uncharted territory.
“Stumbling”
finds Unter Strøm at their most atmospheric and emotionally exposed. It moves through shifting arpeggios, submerged textures and evolving rhythms with an almost weightless quality, serene in one moment, intense in the next.There is a sense of landscape running through the track. Open air. Forests. Rain moving across something distant. The feeling of wandering without necessarily wanting to be found. Yet beneath all of that movement, “Stumbling” never completely leaves the dance floor. The single is the final chapter for their debut EP.
UNTER STRØM is an electronic musical duo forged in the shadows of Los Angeles and San Diego, blending raw industrial grit with melodic finesse. Led by Alex Gonzales (Matte Blvck) and John Kunkel (The New Division, John Grand), the project is a collision of two prolific creative forces & longtime collaborators whose roots run deep in the darker corners of electronic and alternative music. Gonzales has been on a sharp upward trajectory with Matte Blvck, building a global fanbase through relentless touring and a string of sold-out shows across the United States, while Kunkel’s work as John Grand has earned support from tastemakers like Armin van Buuren on A State of Trance and a guest mix on Group Therapy Radio. Together, they meet at the intersection of underground intensity and melodic dark electronic refinement.
Emerging from years of working together in various bands and studios, UNTER STRØM was born from a shared obsession: pushing the boundaries of techno, melodic house, and industrial sonics into uncharted territory. The result is a cinematic, visceral sound that moves between brooding intensity and euphoric release, equal parts warehouse and widescreen.
The fourth and final piece of Between Forms the single “Stumbling” finds Unter Strøm at their most atmospheric and emotionally exposed. It moves through shifting arpeggios, submerged textures and evolving rhythms with an almost weightless quality — serene in one moment, intense in the next.
There is a sense of landscape running through the track. Open air. Forests. Rain moving across something distant. The feeling of wandering without necessarily wanting to be found.
Yet beneath all of that movement, “Stumbling” never completely leaves the dance floor.
That tension has become increasingly important to Unter Strøm. From the beginning, Alex Gonzales and John Kunkel have been interested in electronic music that can exist in several places at once: physical enough for a club, detailed enough for headphones, and expansive enough to eventually be reinterpreted live.
“Stumbling” appeared unexpectedly during an afternoon that had not really been intended as a writing session. A new project was opened almost casually, an arpeggio emerged, then a rhythm, and within only a few hours most of the record had taken shape.
For months afterward, Gonzales and Kunkel assumed they would eventually return to it.
They barely did.
As their catalog continued to grow, the original session somehow remained intact. What initially felt unfinished began to feel complete precisely because it had never been overworked.
Aaron Short returned to mix the track, continuing a relationship that has allowed Unter Strøm to push deeper into the details of their productions without losing their character. On “Stumbling,” some of those details seem to exist only momentarily — sounds emerging from beneath the surface before disappearing again.
The result is one of the more unusual records in the duo’s early catalog.
It carries echoes of the melodic electronic music that first made both artists fall in love with expansive dance records, but it never settles comfortably into nostalgia or genre. Instead, it points somewhere else.
That is also why “Stumbling” was chosen to close Between Forms.
Across “Orynth,” “Fold,” “Fragment” and “Stumbling,” Unter Strøm were never trying to establish a formula. The four records were selected because they reveal different ends of the same project: tension and release, darkness and openness, rhythm and atmosphere.
With a rapidly expanding body of unreleased music behind them, Between Forms is less a definition of Unter Strøm than the first glimpse of its boundaries.
And “Stumbling” may be the moment those boundaries begin to disappear.https://www.instagram.com/weareunterstrom