High Speed Pursuit, the first single from London-based quartet Millpool, arrived in July 2025 through XVI Records — a turbulent mix of thundering bass, jagged guitars, roaring saxophone, and full-throated vocals. Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Misha Hering (High Vis, Virginia Wing) at Holy Mountain Studios, it captured a kind of live-wire urgency, the sound of four musicians trying to find balance between ferocity and control.
The track later opened their debut EP “One Last Midnight,” released today through the same label, and today we’re stoked to give you a detailed overview of their amazing work.
Millpool’s lineup — Josh (guitar, vocals), Ammar Kalia (drums), Duncan Little (bass), and Alejandro VanZandt-Escobar (saxophone) — formed gradually, crossing paths between Vilnius, Vancouver, and Chester before converging in London. What they make together sits somewhere between post-hardcore tension and jazz looseness, with a sharp focus on the physical sensation of sound.
Josh explains how it all began as an attempt to fill a creative void. “As I entered my mid-thirties I really began to pine for the feeling of playing music with my friends, and the void I felt from not doing that felt very pronounced,” he says. After fifteen years of running record labels, DJ’ing, and producing under the name MossGatherer, he felt the energy shift. “After I had my first child, the DJ gigs (and late nights) became a lot more unappealing, but I was getting frustrated with the lack of creative release I was getting. Around this time I got really sparked by seeing bands like Moin, Spy, Angel Du$t play live, and started playing guitar more, writing some of the ideas that eventually became this EP.”
Those early sketches came to life once Josh started playing with Ammar. The two had talked about collaborating during a trip to the Vilnius Jazz Festival, organized by drummer Marijus Aleksa. Ammar remembers: “I’m a jazz drummer by training but have worked mainly for the past decade or so as a writer and arts journalist. Post-Covid things had dried up a bit and I was looking for a new challenge. Thankfully, during that trip to Vilnius, Josh told me about a new instrumental project he was putting together. It sounded very different from anything I’d played before and so I knew it was the right direction to go in.”
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The lineup eventually expanded with Duncan and Alejandro. Josh and Duncan had known each other since their teens, while Josh met Alejandro years earlier in Vancouver. “We bonded over playing records, going on to throw some fun parties under the name Step Into Tomorrow and making music together,” Josh says. “I’d also released some records from his previous musical projects Lucked In & Solapur Road on my record label XVI Records.” He’s been running the label since 2012, releasing everything from jazz and ambient to dub. “It’s one of the things I’m most grateful for with the label, and Millpool — it brings together very separate parts of my life in one place to make something cool.”
That sense of connection runs through the band’s story. Duncan describes rediscovering something he thought he’d left behind: “During my teenage years playing in bands was my life. I loved the connection I felt with my audience when playing live. My musical career came to an abrupt end when I went to university. I was somewhat disillusioned with the whole thing by this point and decided I’d rather pursue the equally mind-bending but far more practical subject of Physics.” He didn’t consider himself a musician again until Josh called. “After our first few practices I felt as though I’d suddenly uncovered a creative part of my brain that had been lying dormant. Millpool is a perfect outlet for this rediscovered creative drive — we’re not really trying to be anything, we just let our collective experience and musical history come through.”
For Ammar, that approach keeps the music unstable in the best way. “I love the energy we have when we’re playing together and how we veer from improvisation to structure, from things coming together to the cacophony of things just about to fall apart,” he says. “That tension and looseness is what keeps it exciting and what drives our experimentation as we continue to develop our sound. I hope listeners can feel the emotion we put into these songs — the energy and enveloping distortion as much as the moments of quiet calm before the storm.”
Alejandro views the project as a return to something tactile after years of digital sound design. “In recent years I’ve spent a lot of time moving audio clips around a timeline on a computer,” he says. “Playing with Millpool has been a refreshing step aside from the realm of computer-bound audio, allowing me to rekindle a slightly neglected relationship with the saxophone and return to the thrilling and unpredictable endeavour that is playing with other musicians.”
He cites Pharaoh Sanders’ “Karma” and Charles Mingus’ “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady” as records that first showed him what collective playing could do. “In those albums I discovered a level of visceral energy and momentum to the collective playing that I really hadn’t heard anywhere before. With Millpool I feel like we’ve been finding ways to tap into that.”
Thematically, “One Last Midnight” looks inward.
Josh calls it “a meditation on the fear of, but inevitability of ascension and what that means for those left behind.” Fatherhood and loss are recurring threads. “It’s something I thought about a lot after becoming a father, and experiencing loss in other areas of life,” he says. “On the flip side, it’s also about remembering to try to enjoy yourself whilst you’re here.”
Millpool’s debut doesn’t sit comfortably in any single category. Its energy is restless, shaped by jazz training, hardcore muscle, and the kind of lived-in clarity that comes only with time. As Ammar puts it, the band is still finding its edges: “Over a year or so of jamming and rehearsing, the current iteration of the group coalesced and we’ve since been honing our live show and writing and recording this EP — as well as new material that will hopefully be out in 2026.”
They’ve already played live at spaces like Other Space Arts in Windsor, and the recording of “High Speed Pursuit” shows how that onstage energy translates to tape — a reminder of what happens when four different lives and histories collide and agree, for a moment, on a single pulse.
For those looking for artists moving along similar edges, the band points to Ritual Error, The Eurosuite, Hearing Tests, Reality, Lunch Money Life, Memnon Sa, Milkweed, Yammerer, TV Cult, and Jabu — a loose network of acts finding meaning somewhere between noise and structure, just as Millpool do.
