Darren Hayman (Hefner / The French) issues I’m Your Team, a surprise studio album release. Hayman has been vocal about struggles with confidence, mental health and understanding his neurodivergence, and so I’m Your Team initially sat on a list of projects that didn’t reach the finish line. However, it slowly became one of Hayman’s favourites works, and having spent much of 2025 redistributing missing catalogue like The Violence and Hayman, Watkins, Trout and Lee, he enjoyed the idea of something unknown appearing in full overnight. This is the second surprise release from Hayman in as many months, following The French’s TV Themes EP on September 18.

These songs were written after the release of You Will Not Die, 2022’s sprawling, minimal and downbeat, double album. “Sometimes after making an album, you don’t want to go into a different direction,” he explains, “You want to go deeper into it, and I felt I was just getting the hang of this stripped, slow, emotional music.”

After two decades of thematic and conceptual albums, Hayman is no stranger to rules and narrow parameters within his works. This album has perhaps the most extreme set of restrictions yet: The only instruments used are a DX7 synthesiser, a TR707 drum machine and a Rickenbacker bass.

“I looked around my music room for the least loved and most underused machines I have,” says Hayman. “The DX7 was a very expensive digital keyboard when it came out in 1983, and became completely ubiquitous through the 1980s on hits by Prince, Whitney Houston and Phil Collins. Even its Wikipedia page describes its sound as outdated and clichéd.”

It was also notoriously difficult to program, using a series of algorithms through a calculator-style screen and a membrane data entry. “The DX7 is so famous for being hard to manipulate that I wanted to be one of the very few people who still knew how to operate it. Each time I discovered how to make a sound, a song came out of it.”

Reflecting on the album’s creation Hayman shared: “At the time, I became obsessed with making these ugly boxes sound sad and beautiful. Like a few of my more recent albums, the songs are direct, recorded solo. Rather than chasing a concept or piece of history as I’ve been known more for in the last decade or so, I’m reacting to and writing about my own sense of loss, with no characters or other players to hide behind. I’m not sure why I didn’t release it at the time, a loss of confidence perhaps. I now believe that it’s one of the most focused and beautiful records I’ve ever made. I love it.”

The album’s original title, ‘DX707,’ was replaced by Hayman, feeling the album was more than the sum of its parts. “I do this a lot, I make a feature out of the method, when the method isn’t as interesting as the result. This feels like an album, not a project, exercise, experiment or gimmick. I hope people will hear some of what I do.”