The debut album of Yemisi Strand-Kowalczyk, released in 2215 on Ironshore Records (Vantablack subsidiary) after a demo neural-feed clip went unexpectedly viral across Tiers 2 through 4. Strand-Kowalczyk, raised in the Circuit and trained at a Tier 3 municipal music conservatory, built Tender Hours over four years in a home studio using a combination of traditional acoustic instruments (kora, nyckelharpa, mbira, prepared piano) and a modified BCI rig that allowed her to directly translate emotional states into harmonic parameters — a technique she developed herself and has never fully explained. The album is eleven tracks, forty-seven minutes, and occupies a sound that critics struggled to categorize: too melodic and emotionally direct for ambient, too sparse and interior for pop, too accessible for the underground scenes that initially championed her.

The three most-discussed tracks are 'Current Address,' a kora and voice piece about her mother's migration from the Shelf to the Circuit that uses a field recording of Circuit transit infrastructure as rhythmic backbone; 'Soft Machinery,' the album's most widely shared track, a three-minute piece that many listeners described as the first music that made them feel 'actually understood' — a phrase that recurred so often in listener responses that Strand-Kowalczyk referenced it with evident discomfort in interviews; and 'Tender Hours (Reprise),' the closing track, nine minutes of solo prepared piano that gradually incorporates the sounds of the building she lived in during recording — pipes, footsteps, a distant argument — until the boundary between music and habitation dissolves.