Steven Julien Had Every Plugin in the World. He Built an Album With One Drum Machine Instead.

Why limit yourself to one drum machine in 2026?

Anyone making dance music right now has access to more rhythmic tools than at any point in history: infinite plugin drum racks, sample packs scraped from every machine ever built, AI-assisted pattern generators. Steven Julien looked at all of that and picked exactly two boxes: the Roland TR-808 and the TR-1000. "808 Prince" is what happens when a producer who has spent over a decade moving between house, techno, grime and electro decides the fastest way to say something new is to say it with less.

That's not a gimmick for Julien. As FunkinEven, he built his name on exactly the rhythmic lineage the TR-808 invented: the same chip that gave Chicago house its kick, Detroit techno its snap, and grime and UK electro their bounce. Building an entire record around it isn't nostalgia, it's an argument that those genres never really split from a shared drum machine DNA in the first place.

What's actually on "808 Prince"?

The album runs ten tracks on Apron Records, the imprint Julien has run himself for years. Lead single "60SS" set the tone before the full release landed:

"LOST" followed as the second preview, pushing the 808 bassline into house-club territory. The rest of the tracklist, AFTERS, TTT, SENSATION and DUCK among the solo cuts, pulls in guests on four tracks: James Massiah voices both T2 and LIME, J. Caesar joins him on LIME, Touch Sensitive features on MONKWAN, and Jarren and KIAH close the record out on DRIVE. Nothing on the album strays from the two-machine brief, which is the point: every texture, every snare, every hat is traceable back to the same source.

Why does this matter beyond gearheads?

Most producers treat genre as a lane and hardware as a toolbox you raid for whatever fits. Julien is doing the opposite: fixing the toolbox and letting genre move freely across it. That's a quiet rebuttal to the idea that house, techno, grime and electro need separate sonic vocabularies to coexist on one record. For a scene that spends a lot of energy policing its subgenre borders, a self-titled drum machine running through all of them at once is a pointed statement, even without a press quote to underline it.

Built entirely around the iconic sonic palette of the Roland TR-808 and TR-1000, the record explores the shared heritage of techno, house, acid house, grime and electro.

Julien celebrated the release the way Apron Records usually does, on a dancefloor: a label takeover at Radial in North London the same night the album dropped.