FEATURE:
Early Risers
IN THIS PHOTO: Sam Fender
Predicting Which Albums Could Be in the Running for the Mercury Prize 2025
_________
ALTHOUGH it is March…
IN THIS PHOTO: Lambrini Girls/PHOTO CREDIT: Nicole Osrin
I wanted to look ahead to the Mercury Prize. Although the awards are not until the autumn, we are sort of halfway between last year’s ceremony and this year’s. Last year’s prize was won by English Teacher. Their album, This Could Be Texas, was a deserved winner. I think there are some strong albums released late last year and this year that are likely to be among the shortlist when it is announced later in the year. That usually happens a few months before the ceremony. Highlighting the best albums from British and Irish artists, the Mercury Prize is one of the highlights of the music calendar. Because of that, I wanted to do an early temperature check. Ten albums that could be on the shortlist of ten. Some of the albums that could be in contention…
LATER in the year.
___________
Sam Fender – People Watching
Release Date: 21st February, 2025
Label: Polydor
Producers: Adam Granducie/lMarkus Dravs/Sam Fender/Dean Thompson/Joe Atkinson
Review:
“Sam Fender has had a hell of a few years. Granted, with the release of his 2019 debut ‘Hypersonic Missiles’, he rocketed to the top of the charts, but the fervour that would unfold in the wake of its follow-up, 2021’s ‘Seventeen Going Under’ was still hard to comprehend. Graduating rapidly to festival headliner, and bagging a slew of awards along the way, his step up to a bonafide stadium artist has been swift.
It’s little surprise as to why; on ‘Seventeen Going Under’ the North Shields songsmith penned a series of powerful, poignant offerings that dug deep into the heart of working class struggle, with the kind of consideration and compassion that only can only ever come via real life experience. It was stunning in its sentiments, and along with some perfectly-plotted meme moments along the way (his hungover appearance on BBC Breakfast still does the rounds now), his reputation as the ultimate man of the people was solidified.
That’s why his next step is all the more interesting. With a handful of stadiums already booked and on their way to selling out (this year will mark his third, fourth and fifth time filling his beloved St. James’ Park), it’d be easy to imagine Sam busting out ten ready-made bangers for this third record, but what he does instead is so much more satisfying. While led by its storming - but no less devastating - lead single ‘People Watching’ (its chorus’ anthemic refrain of “Somebody’s darling’s on the street tonight” is up there with ‘Dead Boys’ and ‘Spit Of You’ in terms of a lyrical trojan horse), the album is, on the whole, much more sedate than its predecessor.
Unafraid of delving into both the personal and political - and, at times, where the two very much intertwine - ‘People Watching’ is an album that burrows under the skin of current society and refuses to dress up its stark reality. Take ‘Chin Up’’s tale of the current cost of living crisis (“The cold permeates the neonatal baby / Can’t heat the place for fucking love nor money”) or the disastrous impact of privatisation and capitalism explored in ‘Crumbling Empire’ (“My old man worked on the rail yard / Getting his trade on the electrical board / It got privatised, the work degraded / In this crumbling empire”); these songs paint a vivid and all too real picture of society in disarray.
But in among these portraits of the “marred streets”, there’s also a glimpse into the mind of our narrator: a young man struggling to find his place in this new version of his world. The twinkling ‘Wild Long Lie’ - a song that will seems all too familiar for any expats heading back to their hometown at Christmas - showcases this best, with Sam’s quiet realisation of “I think I need to leave this town” perhaps optimising the feelings of displacement that fame can so swiftly bestow.
Unsurprisingly, for an album that feels so intimate, its music follows suit. Having worked with The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, there’s an almost filmic quality to these tracks (especially in the widescreen, Joni Mitchell-nodding closer ‘Remember My Name’), matching the observational nature of their lyrics. Less adrenaline-fuelled than some of his previous work, it’s also easy to sense the fingerprints of his own musical hero here too; while ‘Seventeen…’ could mirror Springsteen’s 1975 break-out ‘Born To Run’, this feels closer to the darker, more meditative moments of ‘Darkness On The Edge Of Town’.
Is this the album that people are expecting? Probably not, but that doesn’t matter. Instead, ‘People Watching’ is a bleak but astonishing rumination on our current times, viewed through the lens of Sam’s whirlwind past few years - an album that undoubtedly firms up his position as one of the great songwriters of our time” – DIY
Standout Cuts: People Watching/Crumbling Empire/Remember My Name
Key Track: Wild Long Lie
The Cure - Songs of a Lost World
Release Date: 1st November, 2024
Labels: Fiction/Lost/Polydor/Universal/Capitol
Producers: Robert Smith/Paul Corkett
Review:
“Our first taster from the album was the opener, ‘Alone’, it still stands as a perfect vibe-setting number for the album. Reminiscent of the outfit’s ‘Disintegration’ era, the band builds a mood for over three minutes before Smith enters the picture, his voice unchanged since the 80s. With imagery of birds falling from the sky and bitter dregs, it’s apparent that we’re not getting another ‘Friday I’m in Love’ on this album. That’s not to say there isn’t beauty to be found. The following ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ is gorgeously wistful, Roger O’Donnell’s sparkling keys adding sweetness to Smith’s tale of loss. It’s classic Cure and really captures what makes the band so unique. A command of shadow and light.
The icy ‘A Fragile Thing’ may be the closest the album gets to producing a ‘pop’ number. Matching the spirit of the group’s mid-90s b-sides, the track feels like an anti ‘Lovesong,’ Smith’s conversational vocal delivery dropping harsh truths about how love and commitment can be a blessing and curse. ‘Warsong’ sees The Cure at their most mighty in decades, guitarist Reeves Gabrels unleashing wailing guitars as Smith roars about the poisoning effect of hatred and pride. Especially poignant with the current geopolitical issues.
‘Drone: No Drone’ sees the welcome return of what this reviewer likes to call ‘Sassy Smith’ mode. During these moments – see also ‘Wendy Time,’ ‘Never Enough‘ – the messy-haired icon spits lyrics over a funky beat with a tangible level of irritability. It’s a fun reprieve from the emotional heft of its surrounding tracks and gets the head bopping. A good thing, too, as the following ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ deals directly with the loss of Smith’s older brother Richard. A stately affair, the track is bound to resonate with those who’ve felt the world-changing effect of grief, Smith delivering his best vocals on the record.
The previously unheard ‘All I Ever Am’ makes for a welcome surprise, Gallups’ zippy bassline leading the charge on SOALW’s most uptempo moment. Sure, it’s still focused on memories and regret, but it’s a bit of a banger at the same time, Smith’s baritone bass laying down some serious licks. Before we know it, we come to the aptly titled closer ‘Endsong,’ arguably the number that made the biggest impression when aired live a few years ago. With a length of 10:23, it’s clear listeners are in for something epic, and boy, the band delivers.
Sounding melancholic and majestic as only The Cure can, ‘Endsong’ is a behemoth of emotion. A thick wall of tribal drums and shrieking guitars creates an apocalyptic tone, only reinforced by Smith’s mention of ‘blood red moons’ and repeated refrain of “It’s all gone.” It quickly joins the ranks of other great Cure closers, such as ‘Sinking’ and ‘Bloodflowers.‘ It sounds enormous and best captures SOALW’s spirit. There is no escaping the passing of time.
The old idiom ‘Be careful what you wish for’ is often applied to veteran groups dropping a new album but definitely not here. With ‘Songs Of A Lost World,’ The Cure has not only produced something worth the wait but added another classic to their already sterling catalogue. This is a late-career gem from one of the world’s most idiosyncratic acts.
With a sense of finality running through the LP, it was fair to assume that this may indeed be the end of The Cure’s story. However, as fans know, Robert Smith’s future plans are ever-shifting and a recent interview has revealed another album is almost complete. Onwards then! 9/10” – CLASH
Standout Cuts: A Fragile Thing/Drone:Nodrone/All I Ever Am
Key Song: Alone
Laura Marling – Patterns in Repeat
Release Date: 25th October, 2024
Labels: Chrysalis/Partisan
Producers: Laura Marling/Dom Monks
Review:
“Laura Marling’s rightly-lauded last album, ‘Song For Our Daughter’ (2020), saw her achieve the supreme feat of creating an intensely moving body of work around an imagined child; in the four years since, she actually has become a mother, and the result is ‘Patterns In Repeat’ - a tapestry of love, lineage, and the inextricable links between parents and their children. Now eight albums in, Marling has always mined emotional depths with only the most simple of tools - namely, an acoustic guitar and that singular voice - and here, her signature understatedness is taken even further. The record features no drums at all; instead, each track is blanketed by swathes of lush strings, any additional embellishment having been deemed surplus to requirements. As such, ‘Patterns In Repeat’ is both stunningly intimate and endearingly raw; recorded in Marling’s home studio with her child there in the room, there are aural fingerprints of domesticity - her baby’s gurgling, or the shake of a dog collar - stamped across the finished product, enduring testaments to the context of its creation.
The love of a parent is an obvious, palpable throughline - opener ‘Child Of Mine’ is the purest distillation of such, a pact made and promise sworn: “Last night in your sleep you started crying / I can’t protect you there though I keep trying / Sometimes you’ll go places I can’t get to / But I’ve spoken to the angels who’ll protect you”. Around this central spool, however, are wound the threads of the myriad other emotions parenthood awakens. ‘Looking Back’ (written by Marling’s own father when he was in his twenties) and the incredibly poignant ‘Your Girl’ (which lands like a response to the call of ABBA’s ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’) both speak to a renewed, acute awareness of the passing of time; centrepiece ‘The Shadows’ is a reflective rumination on how the start of one chapter necessitates the end of another. The twinned ‘Patterns’ and ‘Patterns In Repeat’, meanwhile, see her consider her own childhood through a different, more empathetic lens, having gained a deeper understanding of the behaviours and decisions of her parents.
“I want you to know that I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me,” Marling sings softly on the titular closing track. Ahead of giving birth, she has said she faced the internal question of whether motherhood would dilute or extinguish her artistry. ‘Patterns In Repeat’ is a deft and conclusive answer” – DIY
Standout Cuts: No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can/Caroline/Lullaby
Key Song: Child of Mine
FKA twigs - EUSEXUA
Release Date: 24th January, 2025
Labels: Young/Atlantic
Producers: Aod/Jeff Bhasker/Marius de Vries/Eartheater/FKA Twigs/Felix Joseph/Koreless/Ojivolta/Stuart Price/Stargate/Tic
Review:
“This “bliss” is unlike any other. According to her, we can redeem its most exact sense by using the term “eusexua” that she coined while filming in Prague three years ago, with dance music and culture’s tremendous help. It encompasses propitious feelings born out of sexuality and – to add from her hypnotising performances for Valentino and On – honest desperation to feel a connection. In some way, physicality is naturally embedded into it: bodies doing freestyle choreographies in a hazy, brutalist warehouse, techno beats consuming every sound that dares to compete against them. On the titular record, that very sense paints a similar setting (see the music videos for this era so far) in which her vocal and musical power meet their most emotive selves.
As she remarked in a recent interview, EUSEXUA isn’t a bona fide dance album but rather a “love letter” to the genre that has reframed her thinking. The pulpish slashes and abrupt reverses on its spectacular high point “Drums of Death” and the head-spinning climax on “Striptease” may sound like extreme yearnings. Yet, the transformative music takes pride in externalising them and granting a concrete form that we can use as a mode of cathartic release. This is a fresh resolution for her music career. “Perfect Stranger” and “24hr Dog” reek of hopeless impulses sprung from the festering need for human contact, but they don’t develop like her past works. The hysterical pleasures overrule them, sustained by dance and techno’s gratifying template.
Twigs continues to emphasise more on how words sound and less on what they mean. Her lively 2022 mixtape CAPRISONGS was the starting point, on which “meta angel”, “jealousy”, and many more wring out syllables like clothes soaked in luxurious detergent water. Where words were cherry-picked to bring forth an irresistible manifesto of female power on 2019's MAGDALENE, they’ve transmuted into well-articulated carriers of limpid emotion on EUSEXUA – a pivot from complex syntax. Succinct instructions like “Turn your love up loud to keep the devil down” on “Girl Feels Good” and “Work me to satisfy the core of your mind” on “24hr Dog” dominate the lyrics while their orgasmic melodies take over as the singular showcase for twigs’ unique songwriting.
They sometimes leave an uncatered desire for more lyrical depth. In several cases, however, the electrifying music makes up for what’s unfulfilled. For the first time, Koreless takes up the role of EUSEXUA’s primary producer. He casts an eerie mist over every song, a motif that mostly clears towards the end of each piece where all kinds of beats collide and generate a more liberating version of themselves. On “Sticky”, twigs gives in to bodily pleasures, evading “overcomplicated moments”, then snappy, lightning-struck synths plummet down as an escape route. “Room of Fools” delivers a dreamlike transcendence led by her majestic voice after clashes of Björk-esque stems. Koreless’s outstanding lead in the production undeniably shapes much of EUSEXUA’s deliciously bizarre identity.
The vocal contribution from Eartheater on the title track, the ear-catching twists and turns from Stargate on “Perfect Stranger”, and the darker tunes from Ojivolta all make an unrivalled masterclass on world-building. Even the cranky shockwaves, like “Childlike Things”, lurch forth without alienating what’s already established. But EUSEXUA tumbles down into an undesirable hole at the last minute. When putting the healing message aside, “Wanderlust” is amongst her weakest closers for its more predictable structure; after many wild switch-ups and uses of left-field imagery, placing it as the finale feels like an unnerving undoing of their function. It may be a wake-up call to festering reality. All seismic pleasures must meet their end, after all, and what else can we do except relive them by clicking rewind?” – The Line of Best Fit
Standout Cuts: Eusexa/Perfect Stranger/Striptease
Key Song: Room of Fools
Lambrini Girls – Who Let the Dogs Out
Release Date: 10th January, 2025
Label: City Slang
Producers: Daniel Fox/Lambrini Girls
Review:
“The tree’s come down, the hangover’s passed and it’s time to rage again. Peace on Earth can’t last forever anyways, and no amount of tinsel can disguise society’s broken foundations. Thankfully, with their debut album, Lambrini Girls are here to sort it out. There might be protest albums everywhere right now, but Who Let The Dogs Out? goes far beyond mere chest-beating and shitting on the government. This one is special. It might also be the most fun you’ll ever have while screaming at the world.
For Phoebe Lunny and Lily Maciera, fun and fury are inextricable. It certainly helps the medicine to go down, but it gives them an irresistible edge as they make a righteous racket about gentrification, workplace sexual harassment, neurodiversity and more.
Impressively still, pretty much any of these tracks could have been a single. The quick-witted Filthy Rich Nepo Babies ('Hugo wants to be a rock star, smashing up five grand guitars / His dad works at Sony') and the sapphic twist-and-shout of No Homo ('I like your face and it’s in a gay way!') are overflowing with outlandishness, but this band can lurch between silly and serious quicker than you can say ‘patriarchy’.
Even in Nothing Tastes As Good As It Feels’ confrontational, often uncomfortable examination of eating disorders, they still squeeze in wisecracks. 'Kate Moss gives no fucks that my period has stopped' they rage. By its end, Phoebe’s screaming 'GIVE ME FULL FAT, YOU FUCKING BASTARDS!'
We know Lambrini Girls are noisy sorts, but they’ve not quite had enough credit for how great they are with guitars. If they happened to be on a mission to change that, it shows. The menacing buzz that powers opener Bad Apple sounds as much like a distress signal as the police siren that opens it. The squalling Love – a tirade against mistaking toxicity for genuine love – boasts riffs that must have been created with some secret sauce that induces cravings for endless repeat plays.
It all ends with a discordant dance party in the form of C**tology 101, a joyful celebration of self that reclassifies everything from letting go and setting boundaries to autistic meltdowns and 'Doing a poo at your friend’s house' as 'c**ty'.
Still, they’ve done something even more audacious than releasing a track with an off-the-scale number of C-words in it. They’ve dropped an album of the year contender just 10 days into 2025. Big power move, that. Verdict: 4/5” – Kerrang!
Standout Cuts: Company Culture/You’re Not From Around Here/Cuntology 101
Key Song: Filthy Rich Nepo Baby
Rose Gray – Louder, Please
Release Date: 17th January
Label: PIAS
Producers: Pat Alvarez/Zhone/Sur Back/Joe Brown/Alex Metric/Rob Milton/Sega Bodega/Ryland Blackinton/Vaughn Oliver/Sam Homaee/Frank Colucci/Shawn Wasabi
Review:
“Rose Gray’s ‘Louder, Please’ is a mission statement for life from an artist with a laser guided focus on ecstatic dance floor abandon and the transcendent power of dance music’s energy rush.
Hedonism and the desire to have more, more, more permeate the whole record. Opening track ‘Damn’ sets the tone with its rough and dirty groove while ‘Free’ is warm and enveloping in its blissed out expansiveness. The lyrics often have a spiritual and inspiring quality to them that harkens back to the prime era of late 80s dance discovery when anything seemed possible
The thing that makes the album so engaging is it’s not just a parade of beats and poppers o’clock bangers. There’s depth, feeling and rich emotion from Gray’s skilful songwriting, a testament to the years she spent honing her craft as an artist and writer. All this is highlighted in stunning fashion on the spoken word memories and reflections of ‘Hackney Wick’, nostalgic and stirring it’s a track that evokes The Streets ‘Weak Become Heroes’ and feels like something Gray has waited all her life to say.
The album is a sonic journey for head, body and soul to soundtrack all your partying needs for 2025” – DORK
Standout Cuts: Wet & Wild/Party People/Switch
Key Song: Angel of Satisfaction
Heartworms – Glutton for Punishment
Release Date: 7th February, 2025
Label: Speedy Wunderground
Producer: Dan Carey
Review:
“You’d be forgiven for seeing the stark, black-and-white artwork of ‘Glutton For Punishment’ and assuming it contains a much gnarlier or darker set of music than it does. Its provocative title echoes industrial music’s aesthetic obsession with BDSM imagery; the kind of phrase Depeche Mode or Nine Inch Nails would have utilised back in the mid-1990s.
‘Glutton For Punishment’ is painted in dark hues, but its electro, industrial and post-punk blend is an impressively vibrant and straight-up fun listening experience, rife with kinetic rhythms and strong choruses that worm their way into your brain once they’ve conquered your heart. On her impressive debut, Heartworms (real name: Jojo Orme) unveils a seemingly effortless knack for making jet-black music that explodes in vibrant colour across your frontal cortex.
Produced by the in-demand Dan Carey (Fontaines D.C., Squid, Wet Leg), ‘Glutton For Punishment’ is a proper auteurist collection – nine tracks that revel in and unpick its creators’ myriad obsessions, both aesthetic and psychological. Along with the goth-tinged genre blending, Orme’s interest in military history rears its head on imagistic highlights ‘Warplane’ and ‘Extraordinary Wings’, while explorations of a fractured relationship with her mother appear on the engrossing ‘Smuggler’s Adventure’.
However, for all the intriguing and enigmatic lyricism, it’s Orme’ musical craft that really stands out. No two tracks on ‘Glutton For Punishment’ sound alike, but are held together by Heartworms’ commitment to an ambitious and successful attempt to juggle differing tones. A track like ‘Jacked’, built around dark techno synths, or ‘Mad Catch’ and its unusual, angular lead guitars, teeter on the edge of abrasion, but are fused to such strong, powerful vocal melodies and danceable grooves that they consistently materialise as gripping, singular goth pop bangers.
The only tiny criticism is that once or twice Heartworms’ palette ventures a little too close to retro eighties post-punk worship; see the guitars and drum machines of ‘Celebrate’ as an example. But other than that minor quibble, this is a seriously strong debut from an artist in total command of her craft, one that’s all the more impressive for so elegantly incorporating eccentric, sometimes abrasive ideas into its unabashedly pop vision. 8/10” – CLASH
Standout Cuts: Just to Ask a Dance/Extraordinary Wings/Glutton for Punishment
Key Song: Jacked
jasmine.4.t - You Are the Morning
Release Date: 17th January, 2025
Label: Dead Oceans
Producers: Julien Baker/Phoebe Bridgers/Lucy Dacus
Review:
“Released via Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records, her signing is the stuff of indie legend. Having toured with Lucy Dacus pre-transition, they continued to demo-swap until Cruickshank convinced her friend to play the tracks to Bridgers. Both musicians wanted to produce the album, and with their boygenius bandmate Julien Baker privy to the conversation, it was settled that all three would take on the role. Cruickshank then flew her trans-femme bandmates to LA to join her for the recording.
The songs on You Are The Morning were born out of some of the darkest moments of Cruickshank’s life. After coming out to her friends and family in Bristol, she found herself homeless and dealing with a divorce. She moved to Manchester and slept on floors and sofas, quietly writing her thoughts, experiences and fears into song.
Tracks like “Woman,” the first song she wrote after coming out, are so dense in emotion you can feel them tightening across your chest. Recorded with the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles, the song takes on a new, and perhaps even more vital importance upon its release.
Community is a big theme for Cruickshank, and the bright reprieve of “Best Friend’s House,” with its Daniel Johnston innocence, captures the warmth and safety of something so simple.
First single “Skin on Skin” is a blow-by-blow of Cruickshank’s formative experience of t4t intimacy, the lyrics as evocative as Baker’s guitar solos, while the Elliot Smith indebted chug of “Elephant” eschews chorus for an ever-captivating rhythmic revolution of verse.
Her love of Adrianne Lenker plays out across some of the record’s more delicate moments, including its title track which platforms her intricate guitar-work alongside poetic ode. Written for one of her best friends, the song breaks into chorus with a message of hope.
It’s that promise that things might get better which forms the heart of You Are The Morning. Even on the wild-eyed bombast of the Bridgers duet “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation,” as Cruickshank imagines herself floating in a blood-filled tub, there’s still the glimmer of a brighter future. “I won’t act,” she promises, the track itself alive with staccato turn of phrase. “With my eye movement I’ll see you dent cans just for to get the discount. We can rewind and un-dent reprocess and desensitise,” she sings, each line its own hook.
Just as Cruickshank has put her body and soul into the writing of her debut, the boys’ production perfectly complements its dynamics and sentiment. There are moments when they turn the pressure up; from the aching harmonies of “Breaking in Reverse” to the wall of sound on “Elephant,” and moments when they bring it crashing down. “New Shoes" – an old release reworked with loaded emotion – almost feels invasive to listen to.
You Are The Morning comes at a time when life is getting darker for the trans community. While Cruickshank couldn’t have predicted the political climate her album would be greeted with, she could probably have guessed it. Even though the songs are painfully personal, they offer a wider hope. The world feels dark right now, but albums like this give promise that the dawn is coming” – The Line of Best Fit
Standout Cuts: Skin on Skin/You Are the Morning/Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation
Key Song: Woman
Antony Szmierek - Service Station at The End of the Universe
Release Date: 28th February, 2025
Labels: Mushroom Music/Virgin Music Group
Review:
“Manchester’s Antony Szmierek has always had a knack for finding profound meaning in life’s mundane waypoints, and his first full-length record transforms these familiar pit stops into a metaphysical journey that would make Douglas Adams proud.
The former teacher turned word-wielding dance architect hasn’t just crafted an album – he’s created an entire universe where everyday characters cross paths at his imagined Andromeda Southbound services.
The album opens with its title track, a swirling blend that introduces us to an ensemble cast including a hen party, a wandering yoga teacher, and star-crossed lovers who could have stepped out of a Mike Leigh film. These characters weave through the record like threads in a cosmic tapestry, their stories intersecting and diverging with the precision of orbital mechanics.
The production throughout is masterful, echoes of musical heritage scattered throughout, but in a way that never feels derivative. Instead, Szmierek has absorbed these influences and reassembled them into something distinctly his own. ‘The Great Pyramid of Stockport’ might be the album’s creative peak, turning a local landmark into an existential meditation on permanence and legacy. It’s preceded by ‘Rafters’, where “the Patron Saint of Withington” meets “a pound shop Geri Horner” in a love story that somehow manages to be both ridiculous and deeply moving.
The record closes with ‘Angie’s Wedding’, a euphoric finale that brings the whole cast back together in what might be heaven, might be a wedding reception, or might be both. The Orbital-inspired synths and breakbeats create a sense of transcendence that feels earned after the journey we’ve been on.
What makes ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ so special is how it balances its narrative framework with genuine heart. Szmierek has created something rare: an album that works both as a collection of immediate, affecting songs and as a larger narrative about how we find meaning in the spaces between destinations. It’s like overhearing a hundred different stories while waiting in line for a mediocre coffee, and realising we’re all chapters in the same grand novel” – DORK
Standout Cuts: Rafters/The Great Pyramid of Stockport/Angie’s Wedding
Key Song: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Fallacy
Richard Dawson - End of the Middle
Release Date: 14th February, 2025
Labels: Weird World/Domino
Producers: Sam Grant/Richard Dawson
Review:
“The intrigue surrounding Richard Dawson’s latest album begins before you’ve even pressed play. With a title like ‘End Of The Middle’, the veteran Geordie folk singer is inviting multiple interpretations of his work without even needing to hear a guitar string strummed or his characterful drawl.
In an era of such political upheaval, it could very easily point to the end of centrism as a political ideal. The world over, politics is increasingly being fought by those on the fringes, in particular the far-right, who continue to shout the loudest and dominate a news cycle that simply cannot find a way to contain its pervasive, damaging rhetoric.
Equally, it could relate to our relationship with aging, a topic equally at home in the current zeitgeist with films like The Substance throwing a spotlight on both personal and societal reactions to that most natural of human process. Zeroing in on Dawson’s own personal context – approaching his mid 40s, originating from the north of England, with a career of socially-focused music behind him – seems to provide a third, most tantalising reading. Class.
The idea of a class system is not something unique to the United Kingdom, but it does feel like our specific approach to connecting people’s worth to their monetary wealth is uniquely long-standing and sophisticated, making it difficult to define and, therefore, even more complex to untangle in the name of progress.
With this reading, ‘End Of The Middle’ turns into a record that focuses on the end of an accepted definition of a British middle class. With those sitting on hereditary wealth beginning to define themselves as working class simply because they have a part time job with little-to-no stakes, there’s an argument to be had about whether it’s become redundant as a concept already.
Dawson, seemingly, doesn’t think so, as he takes 45 minutes and nine songs to construct a collage of the relative comfort and mundanity that comes with being envious of those richer than you and those worse off than you. In other hands, there’s the potential for this subject matter to transform a record into an embittered undertaking, but Dawson is a cannier operator than most.
Instead, he presents this reality at face value, injecting these compositions with the kind of humour that draws a wry chuckle, and the kind of quaint familiarity that makes this all seem fairly aspirational, even if the characters at the centre of its gaze are discomforted by their lot in life.
Taking his cues from Japanese film director Yasujirō Ozu, a man who used his entire filmography to track how intergenerational familial tensions reflect wider societal discussions about traditions and transformation, Dawson allows you to make the call for yourself on how you feel about those in this comfortable limbo. It’s an exceedingly impressive character study that, with its straight-faced and straight-laced perspective, gets under the skin of these conversations in a way that you fear a more judgemental or overtly sympathetic observer wouldn’t be able to.
An album of rare patience and empathy, ‘End Of The Middle’ doesn’t ever allow itself to descend into forthright commentary. Instead, it presents its scenes to you, inviting you in, and allowing you the time to reflect on the quiet luxury of finding such comfort a drag, in turn asking you to consider the fates of those who would find such a life an aspirational relief from the breadline. An album for our times, indeed. 8/10” – CLASH
Standout Cuts: Gondola/The question/Polytunnel
Key Song: Boxing Day sales