There are artists who make records, and then there are artists who make statements. With his long-awaited debut album, Lost, Found & Forgotten…, Dutch DJ and producer Chris Stussy firmly plants himself in the latter camp. Due to land on April 3 via his own Up The Stuss label, the 19-track project is the most ambitious and revealing work of his career — a sprawling, deeply personal record that feels less like a collection of songs and more like a map of a creative life lived at full tilt.
Stussy has spent years building Up The Stuss into one of dance music’s most distinctive brands, earning a devoted following through obsessive attention to both sound and aesthetic. But Lost, Found & Forgotten… marks something new — a willingness to lay bare not just his instincts as a producer, but his vulnerabilities as an artist. The album is organized around three interconnected chapters that share its name: Lost, Found, and Forgotten. Each one approaches his world from a different angle, yet all three pull toward the same gravitational center.
The guiding image behind the whole project is a kite — simple, poetic, and surprisingly rich as a metaphor. A kite moves freely, shifts with the wind, and changes shape depending on where you’re standing when you look at it. But it never truly escapes; there’s always a thread connecting it to the ground. For Stussy, that tension between freedom and rootedness is exactly what this album is about. The music roams across emotional and sonic territory he’s never publicly explored before, yet it never loses the groove and intentionality that have always defined his work.
Speaking about the record, Stussy has described the process as genuinely liberating. Collaborating with other artists, pushing past his own comfort zones, and refusing to second-guess himself gave the project an energy that feels unmistakably alive. He’s called it the work he’s most proud of — and listening to how the three chapters unfold, it’s not hard to understand why.
The opening Lost chapter is perhaps the most intriguing conceptually. Rather than arriving as a collection of fresh ideas, these are tracks that existed in various states across different points in Stussy’s journey — sketches and half-finished thoughts that never found the right moment to surface. Here, they finally do, polished and purposeful, transformed from abandoned ideas into fully realized pieces that feel every bit as vital as anything newly conceived. Found shifts the energy outward. Built on collaboration and the kind of creative electricity that comes from real human exchange — digging through records together, trading ideas, building on each other’s instincts — this chapter is warmer and more expansive, its emotional range widened by the presence of a varied cast of contributors. Then comes Forgotten, the album’s closing chapter and perhaps its most rewarding for those willing to sit with it. These are the deeper cuts, the patient rewards, the tracks that don’t announce themselves loudly but linger long after the listening is done. It’s a chapter written for people who love music enough to let it reveal itself slowly.
What runs through all three chapters is a deliberate blurring of the line between the real and the imagined. Like watching a kite from different distances, Lost, Found & Forgotten… shifts in texture and meaning depending on how closely — or how loosely — you hold it. It’s an album that rewards both the casual listener and the obsessive, offering something different each time you return to it.
Each chapter is set to be unveiled individually in the weeks leading up to the full release, meaning the journey toward April 3 is itself part of the experience. For an album so concerned with discovery, that feels exactly right.
