Pitchfork clocks the title track on Exhale at 160 beats per minute. Three and a half minutes in, the drums drop out entirely. They come back just as abruptly, with nothing to tell you they are on the way. That moment says more about this record than any genre tag could. Batu and Donato Dozzy released Exhale on !K7 on 30 June 2026, and three and a half months on it rewards a slower, more considered listen than the release week news cycle gave it.

The word reviewers keep reaching for is restraint. Resident Advisor's Henry Ivry calls it "restrained, cerebral techno with a hint of bass weight." Read that carefully, though. Restraint here does not mean quiet, and it does not mean slow.

Two DJs who never rush

Batu is Omar McCutcheon, the Bristol producer and DJ who founded the Timedance label. !K7's label copy has him starting from dubstep and the logic of the soundsystem, then bending both into "inventive mutations that defy easy categorisation." Donato Dozzy is the Roman producer Donato Scaramuzzi, a name European techno has looked to since the 2000s and one half of Voices From the Lake. If you want proof of how patiently he plays, his Boiler Room set from Rome, recorded at Brancaleone, has him playing records for the best part of six hours.

Different generations, different scenes. The shared trait is patience.

From a B2B to a record

Batu and Dozzy got to know each other in Japan in 2019, but the first thing they made together was a set, not a track: an unannounced B2B at Draaimolen, the Dutch festival, in 2023. The label says it went viral soon afterwards. The festival has posted a short official clip from the AURA stage. Speaking to Mixmag, Dozzy said the set was unplanned, and that he played records he "hadn't played for maybe 20 years."

Batu was in Rome to play in February 2025 and held on for one more day so he could spend it in Dozzy's studio, "that Aladdin's cave of hardware," as the label puts it. Dozzy told Mixmag: "When he arrived, the studio was already warmed up, and in three hours, we recorded something like 12 ideas." The sketches then travelled to Bristol with Batu, and the pair kept passing material between them until Exhale was done.

Dozzy's account of playing together is the line worth pinning above the decks: "When you play with other people, there has to be some level of understanding of each other, listening to each other, and respecting their space."

What restraint sounds like on Exhale

Eight tracks, about 47 minutes. Most sit between four and a half and six minutes, and the title track runs 8:44. Tempos vary across the record; Batu says in the label copy, "We tried lots of different tempos, different rhythmic patterns."

The critics do not agree on how restrained it is, and that disagreement is useful. RA hears "Swarm" as "barely there," a track that thins itself out until almost nothing is left. Pitchfork's Philip Sherburne hears the same track, alongside "Off Axis" and "Flicker," as "all relentless in their forward drive." Both can be right. The intensity is real, but it comes from what gets taken out: a false ending on "Bloom" before one last encore; drums that vanish and then return; a kick that Pitchfork hears ringing on until the next bar has almost arrived.

"Bloom" also gives us the best description of the whole approach. Pitchfork points out that its bass line is not locked into a loop that repeats every bar. The pair let it unfold over four, "so that everything breathes."

The label copy says the bookends, "Emergence" and "Bloom," "dial back the drums to focus more roundly on melodic synthesis" while keeping "a strong kinetic urgency." RA's favourite moment on the album is the title track, whose syncopated rhythm hides sub hits and arpeggios "that you have to listen closely for."

Where it fits in a set

Think of Batu and Donato Dozzy's Exhale as a set of tools for the moments where a long mix goes flat. This is the raw material for restrained techno DJ sets, the kind that hold a room by holding something back.

  • Openings. "Emergence" has movement without a wall of drums, so the room can settle while the groove is already going.
  • The stretch after a peak. "Swarm," heard the way RA hears it, gives you somewhere to go that is not a reset to zero.
  • A peak that earns a second wind. The title track's dropout and return shows how much a pause can sharpen the moment the drums land again.
  • The close. "Bloom," whose false ending hands you an encore without reaching for another record.

Talking to Mixmag about how he works in the studio, Batu said that "if you're at maximum intensity for a long time, you'll go crazy." The same holds for a dancefloor. If you are thinking about how long tracks change the shape of a set, our piece on Actress and the case for slow DJing covers that from another angle, and why phrase mixing matters when recording is the practical side of letting a four bar idea finish before the next one starts.

Restraint is easiest to judge on playback. When you listen back to a recording of your own long set, you hear whether the quiet stretches were deliberate or just dead air, and whether every blend was pushed to the same level. Recording your sets with Ohm on iPhone is one way to get that honest second listen.

Where to go next

Exhale is on Bandcamp, with the digital album listed from EUR 11 and vinyl from EUR 29, and on Qobuz and the !K7 store. After that, dig into the Timedance catalogue and Dozzy's work as Voices From the Lake. Then go back to your last recorded set and find the place where you could have let it breathe.