Bonobo
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Bonobo is Simon Green, a Brighton-born, Los Angeles-based producer who has been a cornerstone of Ninja Tune since the early 2000s. His music is downtempo and electronica shot through with nu jazz, trip hop and sampled acoustic instruments - Black Sands, Migration and Fragments are the records most people know him by, and 'Cirrus' and 'Kong' are the ones a crowd waits for. Since 2010 he has toured with a full live band rather than DJing, typically seven or more players covering strings, horns, guitar, keys and drums, with guest vocalists on the songs that need them. His eighth album Distance In Static arrives 11 September 2026 on Ninja Tune, and the North American run behind it debuts a new stage show designed by Pierre Claude.
Popularity
We couldn't confidently match Bonobo to an artist in MusicBrainz, so we won't put a number on them — a score taken from the wrong artist is worse than none.
How this is measured
An absolute, national (US) measure — not a ranking against the other artists on this site. We take the strongest of three open signals: ListenBrainz listens, English Wikipedia pageviews, and the number of Wikipedia language editions that have an article. The strongest one wins, so a signal we couldn't read never drags the result down. Bucket 1 means measured and small. Unrated never means small — it means we don't have the numbers.
Listen
Top songs
No confirmed track list for Bonobo yet — the search links above will find their catalogue in the meantime.
Upcoming shows
KCRW Presents Bonobo: Distance in Static Live North American Tour
KCRW Presents Bonobo: Distance in Static Live North American Tour
Bonobo - Distance In Static Live North American Tour
What listeners say
The consistent verdict across live reviews is that the band is the reason to go: a formidable ensemble whose transitions between tracks are described as being as smooth as a well-mixed DJ set, with brilliantly-programmed lights and album artwork animated behind the band as a real part of the show. The crowd runs unusually wide - one reviewer sketched it as 'boiler room heads to the aging hip hoppers via the bearded nu jazz hipsters' - and the jazz flute solos draw some of the biggest cheers of the night. The criticisms are real but narrow: crowd chatter over the quiet passages is a recurring complaint - the tender tracks reward a concentration some rooms will not give them - and Green himself speaks very little on stage. Expect a listening-and-swaying concert, not a peak-time club night.
Loved
Gripes
Gathered 2026-08-24 (high confidence) from musicbrainz.org, wikidata.org, en.wikipedia.org, gigwise.com, popdust.com, insounder.org, liveforlivemusic.com, coogradio.com, jambase.com, exclaim.ca, news.google.com, https://www.deezer.com search API — artist image via exact case-insensitive name match, highest fan count