Tip! Dylan Henner returns with Star Dream FM, an album that transforms the genre boundaries of ambient music into something intimate and cinematic. Announced for release by Phantom Limb, the record unfolds as a single unified transmission—imagined as a late-night radio broadcast playing back cherished adolescent memories. Through synthetic choirs, drifting marimba lines, and delicately fractured electronics, Henner crafts a narrative of recollection that is both highly personal and universally resonant. Tinted in nostalgia but never mired in sentimentality, each piece feels less like a self-contained song and more like a vignette in an ongoing story: moments fade in and out like radio frequencies, capturing fragments of feeling with an unforced, contemplative ease.​

The premise is as much fiction as autobiography. Henner guides his listeners through formative experiences, threading them with the luminous haze of adolescent longing and wonder; but the album’s real achievement is the way it conjures communal echoes of youth, inviting recollection of memories both lived and imagined. The musical palette—choral washes, gentle static, rain, the distant pulse of marimba—evokes both the clarity and the blur of memory. Individual textures shimmer: voices, keys, and electronics drift together, at times buoyant, at times submerged. Yet the progressions remain calm and deliberate, advancing like a drifting signal, never hurried by structural convention or expectation. The result is an album that envelops the listener, a sonic blanket for introspection and dream.

Henner’s enigmatic approach deepens the effect; he communicates not through spectacle but through poetics, working with titles that describe specific moments (“We Ditched School and Climbed Over the Neighbour’s Fence to Swim in their Pool All Day”) but welcoming interpretation. With each release—following The Invention of the Human and You Always Will Be—he has further narrowed the gap between ambient music and narrative, forging works that feel timeless, generous, and hauntingly present. Star Dream FM is best experienced as a whole, its 41 minutes an invitation to tune in and drift—to lose oneself in a musical memory that, though not quite yours, may soon feel like it could be.​