Amid new music and an ongoing fall tour from the War on Drugs, one of the band’s longtime musical architects has something of his own to say. Robbie Bennett, the Philadelphia group’s keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist, has announced not one but two new double solo albums: Steloken and Circulation, both due Dec. 11 via American Dreams. He’s also shared a new song from each record, “Sister” and “The Light on Your Face.”

Bennett joined the Drugs around 2010 and made his recorded debut on the following year’s Slave Ambient. His new records follow his self-released 2020 solo debut, Permanent World, but push his experimental instincts considerably further.

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Piano and synthesizer intertwine on “Sister,” while “The Light on Your Face” emerges from a haunted synth introduction into a distant, anthemic piano melody. Bennett describes the larger project as an attempt to create music that feels like wandering through an unfamiliar place — somewhere you want to keep exploring without ever having to retrace your steps.

The albums grew out of the keyboard rig Bennett uses with the War on Drugs. At home, he sent MIDI from an acoustic player piano into an Oberheim OB-X8 synthesizer, allowing the instruments to perform simultaneously. He then built the records in real time, layering piano, synthesizers, Fender Rhodes, vocoder and the Soma Terra, a polyphonic microtonal synthesizer controlled with a gyroscope and pressure-sensitive sensors. “I was able to react in real time with this instrument that is so expressive and mysterious to me,” Bennett says. “It can go from atonal noise to beautiful, deep, warm chords.”

Originally conceived as a single album, the project eventually split in two. Steloken leans toward Bennett’s warm, fuzzy piano-and-synth compositions, while Circulation takes the same process into more abstract territory, embracing improvisation, accidents and controlled chaos. Even the titles come from family life: Steloken is based on what Bennett’s daughter calls skeletons, while Circulation refers to the meditative sensation of feeling your blood flow.

For Bennett, the imperfections are part of the point. “It’s tempting to mute what’s ugly and what makes me feel uncomfortable,” he says, “but the full spectrum of the mistakes and the triumphs feels most real and beautiful.”

Las month, the War on Drugs released “Who’s That,” their first new recording since 2022 and the studio debut of a song they’d been playing live since 2024. Bennett appears on the track alongside Adam Granduciel, Dave Hartley, Anthony LaMarca, Jon Natchez and Eliza Hardy-Jones. As of yet, there are no further details about the follow-up to the 2021 album I Don’t Live Here Anymore, but the Drugs have been performing new songs “Walk Away” and “Now We’re Talkin'” at recent shows, in addition to “Who’s That.”

The group will perform Thursday (Oct. 8) in Austin ahead of an appearance at the second weekend of the ACL festival, and will be one of the first to play the restored Loew’s Jersey Theatre in Jersey City, N.J., on Nov. 14.

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