At its core, Grandbrothers’ music represents a communion between the old and the new. On their extraordinary new album, Late Reflections (out April 21 on City Slang), the German-Swiss duo place their art in communion with an institution so old it predates their music by seven centuries: Cologne Cathedral. The iconic monument of Gothic architecture, which is both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Germany’s most visited landmark, served as an unusual recording studio for Grandbrothers’ fourth album, marking the only time the Cathedral has ever permitted a recording of this kind. The resulting album pulses with a rare sense of history and architecture, allowing the spatial properties of this magnificent building to shape and deepen the timbre of the duo’s swelling compositions.

Grandbrothers have made a career out of spurning tradition. Formed in Düsseldorf, Germany, more than a decade ago, the piano duo creates richly textured music that straddles the boundaries between ambient, minimalism, and electronica. The result is always different, yet always centered around the unique collaboration between German-Turkish pianist Erol Sarp and Swiss engineer/software designer Lukas Vogel. Across three albums—2015’s Dilation, 2017’s Open, and 2021’s All The Unknown—the duo has drawn peculiar inspiration from what others may regard as a limitation: every sound, every note, somehow originates from one instrument, the grand piano.