You may know every lyric, guitar bend and pause on your favourite album, but chances are you won’t know the producer behind it. Joe Callow speaks to Loren Humphrey, the man behind one of 2025’s defining records, Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal.
A figure drowns in his own hair as the lights dim inside Carnegie Hall, long considered a benchmark of musical prestige. Cameron Winter walks solemnly onto the stage, pulling out his stool, allowing the applause to settle before stabbing the piano keys. Almost a year on from his album Heavy Metal, the performance feels like confirmation: Winter has arrived to serve the next generation of music lovers. But what the ticket doesn’t say is whose fingerprints are all over the record that got him here.
That man’s name is Loren Humphrey and he produced Winter’s critically acclaimed debut album Heavy Metal, with Pitchfork naming it the third best album of the year and his track “Love Takes Miles”, best song. The songs were constructed in Loren’s home. He said: “Nausicaä’s drums is a really good example of what the living room sounds like.
“We just put one mic overhead on a kick and then a mic in the hallway.”
The duo co-produced the album exclusively using tape recording rather than digital software. Loren’s unique recording style is a dying art rarely seen in modern music: “We were doing stuff where we’d send parts back through the tape, two or three times. We call it baking.”
The process was deliberately laborious, as physical tape recording was mainly used in the 1940s right through to the 90s, but is the only way Loren records. “Tape changes everything. I rely on it so much, Heavy Metal would not have sounded the way it does without it.”
Within the music industry, Loren’s name carries weight, publicly however, he remains largely unknown. “I really take comfort in it.”
“The behind-the-scenes world is really small and your reputation will take you so far.”
Taking an anti-Mark Ronson route, Loren has worked with Lana Del Rey, Arctic Monkeys, Fontaines D.C. and more recently Cameron Winter. That quiet credibility eventually reached Winter, with Loren saying: “We’ve had a pretty cynical outlook on how the music industry functions. We also have similar tastes, as we hate a lot of the same stuff.”
Winter sent him a five-track EP titled ‘Ship Valley’, a parody of Americana and Folk. “That was the initial connection… people thought it was like an actual Americana album, and they didn’t get the jokes, but I did.” From that point on, their shared perspective laid the foundations for Heavy Metal. “I understand why people establish these music relationships and stick with them.”
“I love this kid, we’re really close now.”
For Loren, his production style is rooted in personal connection to ensure he can understand exactly what the artist wants. “When I met Cameron, he was around twenty.
“I’ll be talking to him and totally forget I’m talking to someone that age, and then he’ll do something like eat all the blueberries in one sitting or sleep on an unmade bed by accident.”
With the groundwork in place, before they hit the record button, Loren and Winter laid down what he describes as ‘concepts’ for the album to ensure they “steer clear of shameless derivatives”. One of the ‘concepts’ they focused on was traditional folk rules: “The lyrics are more important than everything else, they could extend an entire section of the song.” This folk principle applied to a modern record is unusually quaint; you can hear Winter’s wordplay being a focal point of his songs, foreshadowing the album’s success.
Loren worked with Winter to create a unique sound through irregular instrumentation, such as the use of a French horn on “Drinking Age”, Upon recording the brass instrument it produced a strange static distortion that ran through it, due to a glitch on the tape recording. Most producers would have scrapped it and started again, but Loren took a different approach: “I was about to print a new one [tape], but I said, ‘Oh, it actually sounds kind of cool. It almost sounds like vinyl,’ so we kept it.”
Between recording sessions Loren says: “Cameron would go home and chop the session into a million pieces, start adding stuff and then bring it all back in.” Once they were back they would work on the track together to build it up, “I call it Phase B,” he says. During ‘Phase B’ Winter realised he wanted to cut the two bass parts out of “Love Takes Miles”.
“He initially cut it out completely, and I loved the idea but I felt there was a way to do it that was more subliminal, so I worked at it until Cameron got excited about it”. This strengthened the duo’s trust in one another: “You start doing unconscious shit where I’ll do something just because I know Cameron’s going to like it.
“I’ve been changed by working with him. I’m trying to be like him, to think for him, and I’m making decisions based on what I think I know about him.
“I hate vocal comping and I never want to do it. But Cameron said, ‘I want it to sound comped.’ He wanted it to feel like there were awkward spaces between the lines. When he turned comping into an instrument, I got really excited about it. My whole distaste for it changed.” Vocal comping is a techn Their partnership reveals something central to Loren’s role as a producer: producing became less about control and more about understanding the artist well enough to bring their ideas to life.
Between sessions, Loren would drive Winter home: “I’m just trying to get the record done and make it the best I can with whatever is available. I’ve made, played, and worked most of my life on low budget records.” Partisan Records didn’t make it any easier, providing a budget much smaller than either had anticipated. “Vines” was their first single, and Loren had to negotiate with the label to fund a string arrangement, telling them: “We need money to put strings on Vines,” and proceeded to use the same string recording session for the album’s other songs.
Despite initial resistance from the label, the album became a music-lovers’ favourite, placing fourth in Rough Trade’s 2025 rankings. Loren’s role was not simply what he describes as the traditional producer’s job, “basically the person who makes sure the record gets done.” Instead he says: “the reality is always so malleable,” understanding an artist’s instincts well enough to make them real.
“Seems like some people have somehow picked up so many of the little nuances we thought no one would really notice. That’s probably been the most gratifying part of the album’s success.”
As Winter sits beneath the lights of Carnegie Hall, the audience hears the record that got him there: the tape hiss, the strange distortions, the French horn glitch that Loren chose to keep. Most people in the room still probably could not tell you his name. But they are hearing him. JC
Featured image via Alamy and Cameron Winter on Spotify
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