We’re eagerly looking forward to the release of Adult Jazz’s So Sorry So Slow, their first album in nearly a decade. The London-based four-piece had already enticed us with a couple of tracks, ‘Suffer One’ and ‘Dusk Song’ and as release date draws closer, they are dazzling us again with new single ‘Marquee’. “I think this is essentially a wedding song – written after a spate of going to lots of weddings, feeling happy, lonely, and after 2014, ostensibly welcomed into that institution,” said the quartet’s Harry Burgess. “I was thinking about ceremonies that involve staking out ground, beating the bounds, and hoping for an idea of community broader than a series of sealed family units.”
The track comes with an accompanying video made by Peter Eason Daniels. Watch it below.
So Sorry So Slow is out on April 26th through Spare Thought
After nearly a decade-long hiatus, London-based four-piece Adult Jazz made a triumphant return in January unleashing ‘Dusk Song’, a track full of brooding beauty. Today, the quartet of Harry Burgess, Tim Slater, Steven Wells and Tom Howe announced the release of So Sorry So Slow, their eagerly awaited full-length album. Described as containing some of their “most abrasive but gentle, beautiful and melismatic work to date”, So Sorry So Slow encapsulates a spectrum of emotions including “romance, panic, devotion and remorse, threaded together by an intentionally laser-focused love.” Imbued with a sense of urgency and introspection, the upcoming record intertwines personal narratives with ecological concerns.
So Sorry So Slow was recorded over several years across various studios in London and also in the band members’ flats, at Konk, on the Isle of Wight and in Sussex. Speaking about it, Harry Burgess says:
“We started writing in 2017 and began recording in 2018. We genuinely thought it might be finished in 2018! But things kept developing and, having resolutely not struck while the iron was hot, there was no real external push to rush things after that, so we just kept letting things shift and unfold until it felt right. Listening back to my voice notes it’s nice to notice that there are fragments of ideas from the whole period 2017-2023 which have shaped the record.”
Against a backdrop of ecological uncertainty, the album’s themes emphasize the importance of love, both for the earth and for each other. “Once we started writing, the ideas about unsustainable personal relationships, loving unevenly and heartbreak conflated with a more expressly ecological regret”, Burgess explained. He continues:
“Like contending with big feelings of loss, endings, beauty, desolation, and with how much joy the earth contains in it. Feeling so much gratitude bound up in waves of sadness. Maybe witnessing a slow-motion goodbye to all that, or its last gasps. I love the earth and the life it supports so much. I love how ecosystems fit together – even the brutal stuff. It may be basic to say, but now is the time to be laser focused on that love. I was thinking about human centrality on earth, us as the ‘main character’, the way that is served by faith and romanticism, and the subsequent disingenuous understandings of our position in the ecosystem, as only stewards somehow, rather than subjects. “
The album will see the light of day on April 26th through Spare Thought and ahead of it, Adult Jazz have shared a new single called ‘Suffer One’, featuring a string arrangement by Owen Pallett. Of the track, the band says:
“We recorded the cello and guitar together at Konk, with no-metronome, to get a loose shifting rhythm – then spent time adding splashes of other things in the studio. The final stage was Owen Pallett’s string arrangement, and viola + violin playing. We’ve been listening to Owen’s music since we were 15, and have always admired their songwriting so we were incredibly honoured they were up for it. The strings lent this final surge of energy that helped us feel it was done.
The song itself is about romance and seeking connection- and the sometimes terror baked into that. It was one of the earlier tracks the lyrics were completed on, and it ends with a bit of pathetic fallacy indulgence, which I think in hindsight teed up a lot of the conflation of the personal with the ecological in the rest of the record.”
With its lush instrumentation and heartfelt lyrics, ‘Suffer One’ is a powerful and poignant track cementing Adult Jazz’s status as one of the most incredible and innovative bands in contemporary music. Listen to it below.
All hail the return of Adult Jazz, who are back after a too-lengthy hiatus from making music. We fell for the Leeds-based experimental quartet back in 2013, the year before they released their incredible and widely acclaimed debut Gist Is, which remains a timeless favourite album of ours. Harry Burgess, Tim Slater, Steven Wells and Tom Howe, who make up Adult Jazz, have teased their come back a few times and we’re so pleased they have finally shared ‘Dusk Song’, their first new music in 8 years. “It’s loosely about slowness and panic coexisting,” explains Burgess, “and not really being able to comprehend those paces alongside each other when it comes to how to respond to the climate crisis.”
‘Dusk Song’ comes with accompanying visuals directed by Harry Burgess. Speaking about it, Burgess comments:
“I shot the video with my cousin in a river on boxing day 2022, after a day of festive comfort. It was freezing. We were both in the river and there had been a lot of rain. We had the alarm/flash setting on a camping light and we filmed in slow mo in one take. He is wearing these lorry inner tubes across him like a tunic – something Tim came up with on a stag do no less, and has stuck visually – and a cowl I got from Etsy.”
Full of brooding beauty, ‘Dusk Song’ is after your ears.
Following the outstanding 2014 debut album Gist Is, Adult Jazz released Earrings Off, a 7-track EP, earlier in May via TriAngle. Lead singer Harry Burgess explained the themes behind the record:
“The record is about masculinity. Embodiment, lust, idealisation, privilege, legitimacy and limitation. It’s about acknowledging the weight, with a view to liberation from its past clout. It’s about picking your ideal body, and playing with body language to achieve authenticity. It’s about the possibility of authenticity.”
The quartet have been pairing the EP’s songs with videos and the latest to emerge accompanies the sublime ‘Ooh Ah Eh’. The video was directed by Sam Travis, and as the band puts it “it’s iffy, not for dinnertime”.
This month's guest mixtape comes from the excellent, eccentric and boisterous Perhaps Contraption. The nine piece art-rock brass marching band is known for its high energy shows, blending a wide variety of musical genres like post-minimalism, jazz, contemporary classical, and avant-rock. We're happy to confirm that the music selection sent to us by artistic director and piccolo/flute player Christo Squier is just as eclectic, fun and frantic.
