Nothing’s first chapter — selling stylish, affordable tech products — was marked by the release of an audio product, their earbuds (1), which encapsulated their new philosophy. Over the years, their sound and noise-canceling have gradually improved, and the current generation is among the best value earbuds on the market.

And so, as Nothing enters a more premium era, it’s unsurprising that this too would come with an audio product; their first over-ear product, the Headphone (1). Made in collaboration with speaker company Kef, these are unquestionably the boldest-looking headphones on the market, with cassette-tape-looking cups, combining transparent oval driver housings with an aluminium rounded-rectangle body, and black ear muffs.

This should make for a good balance of premium touch-surfaces but still a light-weight design, with aluminum reserved for the cups. By contrast, Sony’s all-plastic headphones can feel cheap, but the AirPods Max can get rather uncomfortable after extended use.

The most interesting design element is the control scheme. Rather than use any touch surfaces, Nothing has employed a combination of different physical controls: a small paddle controls previous track and next track, a mouse-wheel-like scrolling surface, a customisable button, and an on-and-off switch. This combination sounds confusing on paper, but is designed around on-head intuition, and it’s so appealing to think that you can simply turn your headphones off, or pair it to a new device, through a button press, rather than various long-presses until your headphones make the right noise.

The only negatives on the design are that the headphones don’t fold up, but instead just swivel flat, and that the case seems to have been made by the same company behind the case of the Sonos Ace, whose zippers received regular complaints by reviewers and customers alike.

The audio features look good too, with the standard options of active noise-cancelation and transparency mode, but also support for the high-fidelity LDAC audio codec, wired listening courtesy of the included 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable, and lossless listening via the UCB-C cable. They use custom 40mm drivers, and if you don’t like the out-of-the-box sound, Nothing’s app has a detailed customizable equaliser.

The headphones also boast an impressive battery life, offering 80 hours on a charge with noise-canceling or transparency turned off, or a standard 35-hour charge with those enabled. They also have fast charging, giving you five hours of standard playback or two-and-a-half hours of noise-canceling listening from a five-minute charge.

They will cost $299, available in either silver or black, and are now on sale worldwide.