Roger Sanchez Traces the Breakdancer’s Path Into His First Album in Twenty Years

A twenty year gap between studio albums suggests a project built slowly, piece by piece, or maybe not built at all until something forces the hand. For Roger Sanchez, the something was a global shutdown. Spectrum, his first full length since the early 2000s, exists because touring vanished and a flat in Shoreditch suddenly became a workspace, not a layover. What emerged is a record shaped by London’s wet pavement and gray skies, but its roots run much further back.

When asked to dig into the tracks that formed him, for a recent Nine Songs selection, Sanchez bypassed obvious club reference points. He went to the body first. As a young breakdancer in 1970s and 80s New York, before the decks meant anything, he absorbed the sound of a city where hip hop was cutting through and genre lines hadn’t hardened. Those choices, he explained, weren’t just nostalgia. They’re the raw material his DJ brain was built on. That early footwork and floor timing still echo in the album’s leaner, more angular moments.

The UK’s influence sits right on the surface of Spectrum. A few summers spent connecting with local artists, absorbing the rhythm of the place, changed the feel of the tracks. It’s there in the clipped energy of a cut like “Grinnin’,” with Fedde Le Grand, and in the vivid verbal painting Leo Wood brings to “Dark Days.” Sanchez talks about her writing with genuine, precise admiration, the kind that comes from recognizing a collaborator who fights for the cleverest phrasing, not the easiest one. He likened the process to working with someone like Fiona Apple. That search for concise depth is audible across the record.

The clearest curveball might be Melanie C’s appearance on “I Don’t Wanna Know,” a pairing that seemed unlikely until it happened. The track’s bouncy, off-kilter groove makes sense of it. Sanchez has spent the intervening decades running labels like Stealth Records and UNDR THE RDR, maintaining his Release Yourself podcast, and remixing others, all while learning to produce out of a backpack. The album isn’t a comeback. It’s a producer finally given the static space to germinate ideas that had been rattling around since he was a kid on a dance floor in New York.