corto.alto has never been an artist interested in standing still. Liam Shortall, the Glasgow multi-instrumentalist and composer who built his reputation at the intersection of jazz, club culture, and electronic music, spent 2025 on stages across the world and walked away with the Breakthrough Artist AIM Award in London. Now, with his first new music of 2026, he is signaling a deliberate shift in direction and the result sounds like an artist who knows exactly where he is going.
The Soul in the Sampler: The Unquantized Genius of J Dilla
WHODIS, released on Ninja Tune, pairs Shortall’s production with Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins, and the combination makes immediate sense. The beat leans hard into J Dilla territory: gritty, hard-swinging, built for a rapper who moves with Jenkins’ particular brand of laid-back precision. Where corto.alto’s previous work has leaned into jazz atmosphere and electronic texture, this is something rawer and more direct. The groove is the argument, and Jenkins glides across it with the ease of someone who has been waiting for exactly this kind of canvas.
The choice of collaborator is itself a statement. Shortall describes reaching out to Jenkins as a deliberate move into unfamiliar territory, the act of someone who has earned enough confidence in their own sound to start testing its edges. His debut album Bad With Names earned him a 2024 Mercury Music Prize nomination alongside Barry Can’t Swim, Charli xcx, and Nia Archives. WHODIS suggests he has no interest in simply consolidating that ground.
corto.alto is currently mid-way through a US tour, with headline dates across Europe, the US, and Canada to follow later in 2026 alongside festival appearances at We Out Here, WOMAD, and the Montreal Jazz Festival. Big projects, as Clash Magazine notes, remain on the horizon. WHODIS is the first indication of what that horizon looks like.
