Adult Jazz - So Sorry So Slow (2024) Hi-Res

London-based four-piece Adult Jazz announce their first full-length album in a decade, So Sorry So Slow, out 26 April 2024 via Spare Thought.

Adult Jazz came up releasing music on the tastefully weird labels Tri-Angle and Spare Thought in the mid-2010s. However, based on a casual spin, it would be easy to think the band was inaugurated a decade prior. Their theatrical, yet breezy sound lands in the vein of early ’00s critical darlings like Department Of Eagles and Akron/Family—a jovially exaggerated twist on earthy indie rock. The London-based quartet blurs tradition and absurdity in a wonderfully dizzying way, woozy vocals coasting atop shifty, unconventional arrangements. This technically impressive formula allowed Adult Jazz to find fans among the likes of David Byrne, Oliver Coates, and Björk. As quickly as they rose to prominence, the band wandered back into obscurity, maintaining a low profile from around 2016 until now. After eight years in the shadows, Adult Jazz has finally returned with a new album, So Sorry So Slow. The act’s music has always incorporated leafy tones drawn from string, harp, and reed instruments. On this new batch of songs, Adult Jazz seems fixated as ever on cultivating a lopsided, baroque sonic universe.

In line with Adult Jazz’s past work, So Sorry So Slow plays like the score to some unseen musical. The record tackles human emotion, ecological devastation, and the ways in which the two intersect. But you might not easily clock these themes without explanation—the album’s lyrics are intoxicatingly cryptic. On “No Sentry,” murky horns and mallets support AutoTuned vocals, which ponder the selfishness of modern humanity using mildly grotesque descriptors. “Some tame, tame white man/ He is concerned with his own hand/ On the palm of the ever-growing lesion/ He sits stern through all the warping seasons/ He rots away but thinks himself a Jesus,” lead singer Hary Burgess croons in the opening lines. “Plenary” presents a choppy take on art pop, baritone voice coasting over keyboard chords in constant motion. “I Was Surprised” is the most fluid song here, morphing from an ambient intro to a choral interlude to an outro that brings to mind an orchestra of unoiled robots. So Sorry So Slow is as intricate as it is over the top.

So Sorry So Slow is dynamic and convivial, partly because the members of Adult Jazz seem to have tapped into a hive-mind effect over their time as collaborators. These songs swirl and jitter at random, hinting at a virtuosic collective consciousness. The unpredictability at the heart of the album elicits a warm, deja vu-like energy. It’s like the pleasant experience of a foggy teenage memory resurfacing out of the blue.