There's a version of this record that never got made. The safe version, engineered to fit neatly into one genre, made to tick the right boxes for bookings. That record would have been easier to explain. It wouldn't have been called Same Same, But Different — and it wouldn't have been true.
This is the story of the one that got made instead.
Where it started: Shimmering
It all started with Shimmering. Not the first track on the album, but the first one written — and it wasn't written for an album at all. It wasn't written for anything.
During COVID, Tom Smeyers lost three family members in a short span of time. Like everyone else, he was also locked down, and the studio became one of the only constants left. So he buried himself in it.
What came out was Shimmering — a track made with no genre in mind and no booking in mind. No underground house blueprint. Just a way of processing what was happening, turned into sound.
It fit Tom's style just fine, but it didn't fit anywhere else. The genre gap between Shimmering and the rest of his catalogue was too wide to bridge on a single EP, where every track usually needs to speak the same language. So it went on the shelf, waiting for context that didn't exist yet.
Learning to let go
What stuck wasn't the track itself — it was the process behind it. Producing without a goal, without asking "will this get booked, will this fit my sound," had opened something up. So Tom kept going.
That mindset led to Mia's Groove, 808 Ross, Borgerwood, and more. Different tempos, different textures, different moods — not a coherent EP, but a set of tracks that shared a mindset instead of a sound. Rather than forcing them into a single shape, Tom asked a different question: what if the inconsistency was the point?
From loose tracks to a full story
Albums have fallen out of fashion in electronic music — everyone said so, and everyone was probably right. EPs are safer. Singles are safer. But an album does something an EP can't: it gives you room to build a story.
Instead of a handful of tracks competing for attention, six tracks could be sequenced — placed in an order that builds tension, releases it, and shifts mood, almost like a DJ set made entirely from original productions. That's where the title comes from: Same Same, But Different. Every track came from the same hands and the same period of life, but none of them sound alike. That contradiction is the album.
The outlier: a drum & bass track called Optimus Rhyme
If one track proves the "no boundaries" approach was real, it's Optimus Rhyme.
Tom has always had a soft spot for liquid and intelligent drum & bass — the LTJ Bukem side of the genre. A chance connection with a drummer put a set of live-recorded breaks in his hands, and that was invitation enough. Optimus Rhyme became the album's drum & bass detour, proof that this record was a real cross-section of everything Tom was drawn to, not just a house and techno record with a theme.
Bringing in a voice: Mia Moisa
Mia's Groove and Optimus Rhyme feature vocals from Mia Moisa, a Brussels-based vocalist and lead singer of the band Unyoke.
The two connected and recorded live vocal takes and samples shaped specifically around these tracks. Her voice gave both songs a human presence that sound design alone couldn't reach, and gave Tom a real collaborator on a project that had, until then, been a solo journey.
Six tracks, one label: We Play House Recordings
With four tracks finished — Shimmering, Borgerwood, Mia's Groove, and Optimus Rhyme — Tom brought the project to Bart at Belgian house label We Play House Recordings. The answer was direct: four tracks isn't an album. Come back with two more.
So he did. Shisha Avenue and 808 Ross completed the picture, rounding the collection out to six tracks across two vinyl records. Bart was in, and We Play House Recordings signed it as a full album release — Tom's debut.
The record, in short
Same Same, But Different is a six-track, double-vinyl debut on We Play House Recordings, the Belgian house label known for its underground house and techno output. Rooted in loss and built on the freedom to ignore genre expectations, it moves from the raw introspection of Shimmering through the moody swing of Borgerwood and Mia's Groove, into the unexpected drum & bass turn of Optimus Rhyme, and out through Shisha Avenue and 808 Ross.
It's a debut that never tried to sound like one thing. That was never the plan — and that's exactly why it works.
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