‘LOVE, DEATH & DANCING’ TO BE RELEASED MAY 29, 2020
3-TRACK VOL. 1 IS AVAILABLE NOW, INCLUDING NEW SINGLE, ‘TIME’.
WATCH THE VIDEO FOR ‘TIME’ HERE
‘Love, Death & Dancing’ will be released on May 29, 2020 via Island Records. The music is performed solely by Jack, and produced alongside Jacknife Lee and James Flannigan. It is available for pre-order HERE. The record is preceded today by the sharing of three new songs, Vol. 1, Jack’s first new music since 2016’s ‘Phase’ LP. Jack Garratt accompanies this deeply personal album with an equally reflective long-form visual piece, ‘Love, Death & Dancing – a film by Jack Garratt’, of which the first instalment ‘Time’ is out now on all major video platforms.
Listen to Vol. 1, featuring ‘Time’, ‘Mara’, and ‘Return Them To The One’ HERE
“I wrote this album as someone – and for anyone – who likes dancing but doesn’t necessarily want to go out on a Saturday. It’s dance music for people who don’t want to go out” – Jack Garratt
If Jack Garratt wasn’t a musician, he’d make a mean critic. A detractor of his music could throw a brickbat at him but Jack will always have got there first. Ask him now about his 2016 debut album ‘Phase’ and the 28-year-old doesn’t pull his punches, describing it as “busy and erratic”, “clever bullshit … a record full of beautiful metaphor that doesn’t really say anything. I was scared to actually say something real; I didn’t think people wanted to hear it. That’s why my production on that record is so busy, so saturated.” Yup, he’s down on the production, too. “I didn’t think I was a good producer, so I did lots of tricks to make people think: ‘He’s good.’ Same with the lyrics, with the melodies, all of it: it was just me on a face-value level effectively going: ‘This is good because it’s impressive, not because it’s actually good.’”
‘Phase’ struck so many of us at the time as a debut of rare audacity and bravery, confrontational and challenging pop record that, far from pandering to listeners, instead made demands of us, and was all the more thrilling for that.
As he gears up to send ‘Love, Death & Dancing’ out into the world, Jack looks back on that period not with gratitude exactly, but with an appreciation of the wisdom it gave him – hard-won, maybe, but deeply precious, and an experience that armoured him for the battles ahead. If the process sounds hellish, ‘Love, Death & Dancing’, by contrast, is an ultimately joyous album. It isn’t afraid to lay bare the torment that led up to and informed its creation. But it is also a triumphant testament to survival, and to courage.
“I was in what should have been this huge celebratory moment, I’m 24, 25, my album has not only sold but sold well, globally, the tours were selling out, I was getting all these accolades and awards – I should have felt comfortable, at the very least. And instead I was scared and alone, and desperate for affection. I’d realised that a lot of the pillars of affection were hollow; they weren’t real.”
Working with the producer Jacknife Lee on half of the record and James Flannigan on the other half was “amazing”, Jack says. “They were incredible and really helped me in terms of getting my groove back, my confidence. Jacknife challenged me from a position of respect. He liked ‘Phase’, and was open to the issues with it.” Musically, ‘Love, Death & Dancing’ reflects its lyrical content, moments of mellifluous beauty and calm giving way to outbreaks of cacophonous anxiety and manic energy. If the bluesy spaciousness of ‘Anyone’ recalls Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, ‘Mara’ conjures the production work of Lindsey Buckingham circa ‘Tusk’, while ‘Time’ could be the offspring of both Baba O’Reilly and Boys of Summer. The anguished, propulsive ‘Better’, meanwhile, channels the Beach Boys, Daft Punk and Beat It, and the enraged, accusatory ‘Mend a Heart’ honours the legacy of Cupid and Psyche 85. Throughout, Jack’s extraordinary voice – equal parts soul and blues – soars and swoops, communicating desperation one minute and rapture the next. You never doubt that he means it. You never doubt it’s the truth, unfiltered, unapologetic, laid bare.
“The album was written from the point of view of someone who has a functioning sadness,” Jack says, “who has had his day-to-day depressions and anxieties that have influenced the decisions he’s made. The album is about that functionality, that day-to-day battle, conversation, tug of war. We’re making a film at the moment, to go with the whole album. The premise of it is that it’s me in the back rooms of my mental health, on my own, interpreting the album. The one thing it needs to do is for the very last shot to be exactly the same as the opening shot. Because this battle in my head is cyclical, infinite; it’s a line of consistency, a time loop that’s just going round and round and round.
“I think this is the first time I’ve felt proud of the songs I’ve made. I wrote this album as someone – and for anyone – who likes dancing but doesn’t necessarily want to go out on a Saturday. It’s dance music for people who don’t want to go out! And that’s the music that I love: music that doesn’t care if you’re standing up or sitting down. It’s going to give it to you either way.”
