Album Review: After You by Jack Peñate

A lot has happened in the ten years that Jack Peñate has been away. Bowie is no longer with us, but his legacy of gender subversion lives on. Hip hop is outselling rock at a pace nobody could have predicted. And likely start-up Spotify has become, well…pretty popular. With all this and more ….

Full Review >>

Following two albums of generally bouncy, soul-inflected indie pop that looked to '80s movements such as the 2-Tone ska revival, sophisti-pop, and jangle pop for inspiration (2007's Matinee and 2009's Everything Is New), Londoner Jack Peñate decided to take a deep dive into the recording and production end of things in order to, as he saw it, better express his songwriting. No less than ten years and, per Peñate, over a thousand songs later, he re-emerges with After You. Perhaps surprisingly, the album was co-produced by Peñate, Alex Epton (David Byrne, Holy Ghost!), Inflo aka Dean Josiah (the Kooks, Tom Odell), and Everything Is New producer Paul Epworth (Paul McCartney, Beck).

Full Review >>

Ten years is an awful long time in pop music, and to spend that length of time between albums is usually regarded as a bad sign. Yet an admission that such a rule exists reveals the number of constraints imposed on singers such as Jack Peñate, who are expected to conform to all manner of expectations when surely the removal of those rules would be more productive. Peñate is returning to the long playing game with After You, his first album since 2009's Everything Is New.

Full Review >>

J ack Peñate's back, and this time it's spiritual. Part of his decade away from music was spent - consults notes - indulging in mind-expanding ritual, looking to mysticism and mythology for answers, and reading Hesse, Rilke and Huxley. The suspicion that he's gone full ayahuasca holiday is further heightened by the news that the album's closer, Swept to the Sky, was written "because there was a sound that reminded me of a feeling I had being in the jungle while in Peru".

Full Review >>