“What We Were Waiting For” is the first single from Lophae’s upcoming album Imagine More, released on 3 October. The record follows their 2022 debut Perfect Strangers and comes from the same set of sessions at London’s Fish Factory, recorded live across three days in September and October 2023. For the quartet — Greg Sanders on guitar, Sam Rapley on tenor sax, Tom Herbert on bass, and Ben Brown on drums — those sessions proved unusually productive, producing two full-length albums of distinct character.

The new single revisits an earlier Sanders composition first heard on Teotima’s Weightless in 2019. Stripped of vocals and reworked at a slower tempo, this version gives the line to guitar, saxophone, and bass in turn. Sanders lays out the theme with his thumb-and-finger technique, covering bass and melody together, while Herbert responds on electric bass with phrasing closer to double bass. Rapley stretches the melody in long arcs, and Brown drives the pulse with subtle shifts between snare and ride.

The track lays out Lophae’s method: short written lines become the framework, and the band reshape them as they play. Instead of handing solos around, they keep the figure in play, pulling at its rhythm and contour until it changes shape.

Across Imagine More, that approach takes in a wide spectrum: recorded as a unit in one room, the music reflects the chemistry of players who came together around Sanders’ compositions but quickly shaped an identity of their own.

Listen to and pre-order the upcoming album HERE