Batu & Donato Dozzy announce debut collaborative album ‘Exhale’ on !K7, share hypnotic first single ‘Drift’
Batu and Donato Dozzy have announced their debut collaborative album Exhale, landing via !K7, alongside the release of its first single, ‘Drift’.
The eight-track LP sees two of contemporary electronic music’s most distinctive sonic architects merge their worlds into a deeply immersive body of work, one rooted in techno’s expansive possibilities while pushing far beyond conventional club frameworks.
For years, Batu, real name Omar McCutcheon, has carved out a singular lane through the mutation of soundsystem culture, folding dubstep’s weight and rhythmic experimentation into forward-thinking club music via his influential Timedance imprint. Meanwhile, Donato Dozzy has spent nearly two decades shaping European techno through hypnotic minimalism, ambient tension and subtly psychedelic sound design.
Though the pair first connected in Japan in 2019 through a shared admiration for each other’s work, their chemistry became publicly apparent during a surprise back-to-back set at Draaimolen Festival in 2023, a performance that quickly gained cult status online.
The seeds of Exhale were fully realised in February 2025, when Batu travelled to Rome to work from Dozzy’s famously hardware-heavy studio. Across a series of instinctive jam sessions, the duo mapped out the foundations of what would become the album.
“It was interesting to see Omar interacting with my studio methods,” Dozzy explained. “I know my machines very well. It was fun to do something out of my routine and use my machines in a different way to turn on Omar’s ideas.”
Batu added: “We tried lots of different tempos, different rhythmic patterns. I was excited by the direction we were taking, and getting so many ideas of where it could go.”
That balance between Dozzy’s analogue precision and Batu’s intricate software manipulation appears central to the album’s identity. Across Exhale, the two producers blur their signatures into something fluid and constantly evolving.
Tracks like ‘Flicker’ channel Batu’s sharp-edged percussive intensity against Dozzy’s cavernous low-end pressure, while ‘Off Axis’ leans into wormhole techno psychedelia before erupting into dramatic dynamic shifts. Elsewhere, ‘Spiral’ nods toward Dozzy’s renowned TB-303
explorations, layered with the restless sound design detail often associated with Batu’s Timedance output.
Lead single ‘Drift’ offers one of the album’s most transportive moments, spiralling arpeggios and dense atmospheric textures unfolding into elegant peaks that feel equally meditative and propulsive.
The album closes its circle with ‘Emergence’ and ‘Bloom’, two rhythm-light compositions that place melodic synthesis at the forefront while maintaining the sense of movement threading through the entire record.
“Movement is what I think really brings the music together,” Batu said. “No matter what style it is, I think both Donato and I are producers who think a lot about how things move.”
Dozzy also framed the collaboration as reflective of wider shifts happening across underground electronic music: “In the last years there has been a very interesting hybridization of genres. Many techno producers got interested into the drum & bass world, and also the opposite happened. This made it a good time for a project like this to happen.”
Exhale is set for release via !K7, with ‘Drift’ available to stream now.
