Making his full-length recording debut under the East India Youth handle in 2014, U.K. musician William Doyle spun a meld of Krautrock, ambient, and Berlin-era Bowie influences through contemporary London club culture with Total Strife Forever. The album received accolades including a Mercury Music Prize nomination, and Doyle made one more record under the alias before deciding to diverge from the project and record under his own name. A handful of ambient instrumental albums, including 2016's the dream derealized, followed over the next several years before Doyle presented Your Wilderness Revisited in 2019. A set of compositional, psychedelic-leaning art rock that reintroduced Doyle's voice, it included an appearance by key influence Brian Eno. His sixth William Doyle album, Great Spans of Muddy Time, followed in 2021 with an ambitious, cinematic mix of songs and instrumentals.

Born and raised in Bournemouth, England, Doyle played in an indie band called Doyle and the Fourfathers before becoming disenchanted with guitar music, drawn instead to the possibilities of electronic and dance music. After working up some sketches, in 2012 he passed a demo to John Doran -- one of the editors of the esoteric online music website The Quietus -- at a gig. Doyle's intricate and awe-inspiring sounds prompted the website to set up their own label to release his material. Credited to East India Youth (a name derived from London's East India Docks region), the Hostel EP followed on the Quietus Phonographic Corporation in April 2013.

Encouraged by the positive reaction to the release, he went to work on a debut album that looked to influences including Eno, Tim Hecker, and Harold Budd. Released in early 2014 on Stolen Records, Total Strife Forever was nominated for a Mercury Prize, and Doyle found himself being lauded as one of the most exciting crossover acts of that year. An expanded version of the album followed later in 2014 and included his nearly hour-long soundtrack for the 1916 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had accompanied a live screening of the film the previous year. He came back just a few months later in April 2015 with an equally impressive follow-up album, Culture of Volume. Named from a line in the Rick Holland poem "Monument," it was released on XL Recordings.

When Doyle returned with more music in November 2016, it was in the form of a self-released ambient album issued under his own name. Titled the dream derealised, it had helped Doyle through a period of "anxiety, panic, and a regular dissociative feeling called derealization." He donated proceeds from the album to the mental health charity Mind. A pair of long-form ambient albums, Lightnesses and Lightnesses II, followed in 2017. They were entirely recorded, mixed, and mastered by Doyle. Another instrumental album, Near Future Residence, arrived in late 2018. Pieced together from instrument samples, synthesizers, and field recordings, it was a more whimsical outing inspired by imagining an ecologically sustainable future.

Doyle shifted gears again in 2019 with Your Wilderness Revisited, a return to the indie rock inspirations of his teenage years in suburbia, and, therefore, to song forms. Recorded in various bedrooms and kitchens, with additional recording at 4AD Studios in London, it featured a half-dozen guest musicians as well as an original voice recording by Brian Eno ("Design Guide"). Doyle signed with Tough Love Records for his next album, 2021's Great Spans of Muddy Time (the phrase a description of depression from the memoirs of BBC presenter Monty Don). An ambitious release, it navigated art rock, synth pop, explorative instrumentals, and recording experiments. ~ Marcy Donelson, Rovi