Willie J Healey - Twin Heavy (2020)

This Willie record is an especially happy moment for us, as it marks our first wholly independent release, and we couldn’t be more proud to present it to you here. Willie made one of the great debut bedroom records in ‘People And Their Dogs’, which we were huge fans of and felt very lucky in the wake of that to get a chance to work him, firstly on the follow EP ‘666 Kill’, and latterly on this album. It's a real privilege/responsibility to have our label associated with Willie's music and to put it out into the world, but something we’ve taken to with real fervour. Twin Heavy was recorded in a couple of wildly productive weeks at Echo Zoo Studios in Eastbourne with producer Loren Humphries (Florence And The Machine, Last Shadow Puppets, Arctic Monkeys, Tame Impala). It was a hard collection to land on because Willie has a habit of writing a new song every week, almost always an evolution and improvement on the last. It’s not a bad problem to have but something as a label you have to be mindful of when contextualising a piece of his work. We eventually settled on a selection and the band recorded straight to tape. The life and simultaneous naivety and nous captured in this have really made us feel like we’re sitting on a special little secret ever since we first heard it. Willie spent his teens with his ambitions set on a life as an amateur boxer but an introduction to the music of Neil Young set him on an accidental path of discovering he had a very natural ease with melody. As he told us, it suddenly felt like a better alternative than being punched in the head every day. We’ve been really excited to see him grow over the last few months into an artist really capable of voicing his leftfield eccentricities alongside his very natural classic song writing. This final collection of songs feels to us like all the very best stuff from this last year of writing and recording...and, in our opinions and set against the chaos, a total relief to be in the company of. Thank you for all your support up until now and we hope you love this as much as we do.