The Watchline is the new full-length album from John Tejada. Across eleven tracks, it marks a clear shift—emotionally focused, sonically weathered—built around dense, guitar-led textures that ask to be unraveled. It’s a body of work less concerned with form than with feeling. The result is a deeply personal, ghostly collection of songs that reveal themselves slowly and deliberately.
The album lives in that space. Songs like “Until the End of the World” and “Where the Light Bends” lean into breakbeats, heavy low-end, and layered distortion. Others, “Driftreturn,” “The Navigator,” “Through the Watchline” are slower, more reflective, carried by tape haze, static, and melodic decay. The instrumentation throughout is simpler than in Tejada’s past work, but denser—guitars, synths, and rhythmic fragments stacked and corroded, then reassembled with care.
March Adstrum contributes vocals on two tracks (“Static Searching” and “Apricity”) adding a submerged melodic presence. Adstrum also created the album’s cover art and helped shape the visual language of The Watchline’s world: storm-worn structures, coastal grids, and hidden transmissions beneath the surface.
Tejada reflects, “The Watchline is this idea of a boundary, a place between memory and forgetting, between land and ocean, between who we were and who we’re becoming. It’s where the past still leaves traces, but the future is being written.”
Artist: John Tejada
Release: The Watchline
Label: Palette Recordings
Release Date: September 5th, 2025
Tracklist:
1. Until the End of the World
2. Greywake
3. Northlight
4. Driftreturn
5. Hollowcrest
6. Static Searching (feat. March Adstrum)
7. The Navigator
8. Vaporail
9. Apricity (feat. March Adstrum)
10. Until the Light Bends
11. Through the Watchline
About John Tejada
John Tejada is an Austrian-born, Los Angeles–based electronic music producer, DJ, and composer known for his detailed, emotive, and genre-defying sound. Over the last three decades, he has released a vast catalog of work spanning techno, house, ambient, and experimental electronic music.
He was born in Vienna in 1974 and raised in Los Angeles, where he still resides. Coming from a musical family—his father was a conductor and his mother a soprano—Tejada began playing classical piano as a child before discovering hip hop, electro, and eventually the world of electronic production. By his late teens, he was DJing and releasing his own tracks, quickly becoming part of the international electronic scene.
Tejada is also the founder of Palette Recordings, a label he launched in 1996 to release his own music as well as collaborations and works by other like-minded artists. Beyond Palette, he has released on influential labels such as Kompakt, Plug Research, Poker Flat, and 7th City. His music is celebrated for blending warmth, precision, and intricate sound design, often pairing lush harmonies with deep rhythmic structures.
Some of his most recognized works include “Mono On Mono,” “Sweat (On the Walls),” and “The End of It All” as well as multiple albums like Parabolas (2011, Kompakt) and Signs Under Test (2015, Kompakt). He’s also one half of the duo Wajatta with comedian-musician Reggie Watts, a project that fuses house, funk, and live vocal improvisation.
With a career spanning 25+ years, John Tejada has performed worldwide at major clubs and festivals, while continuing to evolve sonically—moving from minimal techno and house toward more atmospheric, guitar-tinged textures in his latest work (The Watchline, 2025).
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