NOBLEHILL

Release date: Aug 18, 2026

Genre: Jazz Folk/ Contemporary Jazz

Label: Ninja Tune

I’m much more familiar with Jacob Alon’s world than corto.alto’s, so NOBLEHILL caught me a little off guard. It pulls Jacob into a more jazz-leaning, expansive space, and their voice sounds especially clean and almost luxurious against the arrangement. There’s still that fragility and the folkiness I associate with Jacob, but here the vocal doesn’t have to carry the entire song. It becomes another piece of the composition, weaving through acoustic guitar, strings, orchestral textures and the more detailed production around it.

The strings are probably what grabbed me most. They keep building this quiet tension underneath lyrics filled with old walls, carved names, trees, family and things slowly disappearing. Even the repeated idea of a “small fortune” starts to sound less like money and more like what little we actually get to keep from the people and places that made us. By the final lines, the song becomes strangely peaceful about loss without ever making it sound easy. As the final single before corto.alto’s SOME SMALL FORTUNE, out September 4, NOBLEHILL also makes a lot of sense as the album’s closing track: intimate, artful, and slightly suspended in the air after it ends.