STL Maps His Own Terrain on ‘Take Me To Your Leader’

Stephan Laubner has spent two decades proving that obscurity is not an obstacle but a material. As STL, he releases only through Something, the label he runs from his home in Germany’s Harz highlands, well outside the circuits of visibility most producers rely on. That remove has not hurt his reputation. If anything, it has sharpened the sense that each record arrives from a fully formed, private logic.

Take Me To Your Leader, a sixteen-track triple vinyl album scheduled for July 2026, is the latest dispatch. By the standards of the Something catalogue, its scale alone is a statement. Laubner fills six sides with eerie leftfield house, acid, dub techno and raw groove, threading four DJ-friendly loops — A, B, C, E — between longer compositions. Tracks like M‑Brainiac, Lunar Magic and Snug Acid move with unhurried, hypnotic weight. The brighter push of Fat Sunday and Paperboy adds warmth without disrupting the mood.

What holds the album together is less genre than atmosphere. The X-Files shadow Laubner has long cultivated hangs over the whole thing, from the slow, deliberate opener So Bin Ich Dem Leben Naeher to the stripped conviction of closer Standard Fried Stir. There is no narrative arc, only a world built with enough patience that you eventually stop noticing its edges. Laubner does what he always does: he creates conditions for immersion, then steps back. The triple vinyl format is not an indulgence here. It is how the space gets made.