FAMOUS - Party Album (2024) [Hi-Res]

Famous' debut LP Party Album is the record Famous has been threatening to make for eight years – an album that Merrett intimates is a lot like Famous itself, "a long coming-of-age drama that always threatens to end but goes on forever”.

Over the course of two wildly varied and acclaimed EPs, 2019’s England and 2021’s The Valley, shape-shifting London outfit Famous has forged its own inimitable sound. A sound that subverts pop’s Gospels. A barrage of halcyon melodies, despondent electronics jutting against warming acoustics, and scintillating song structure, all this the singular creative vision of Jack Merrett — Famous’ singer, lyricist, core songwriter and only consistent member — that finds convulsively spectacular expression in their forthcoming debut album, Party Album.

Recorded primarily in The Kink’s old studio Konk in Crouch End, North London, Party Album’s nine tracks are cohesive in the way the pieces of a broken heart are, woven together by Merrett’s mercurial vocal delivery and striking lyrics that find epiphanies within crises and crises within those epiphanies. For Merrett, he tersely suggests, it is simply an album of nine love songs.

Written over the course of two years and beginning life as a set of demos that saw Merrett accompany himself on the Fender Rhodes, the group spoke initially of making a more traditional record, improbably inspired by Peter Jackson’s ‘Get Back’, My Chemical Romance, and the folk singer-cum-Christian mystic Judee Sill. Predictably, the work-in-progress gradually became hijacked by their thirst for experimentation. Merrett recalls, “what's funny is we had this idea of making this very authentic rock record. We were constantly talking about how we wanted to make a classic rock record. A stadium-ready classic rock record. But yeah – it just became different over time”.

The mutative writing process creates a pervasive duality within Party Album that revels and reviles at the hideous beauty it creates. Trapped somewhere between idyllic beauty and agonising ambition, Party Album is a swamp of pulsating moods that swallow one another whole.