Keaton Henson is shedding the “quiet boy” persona that has defined much of his career. Embracing the grunge-infused sounds of his youth on new album 'Parader', the elusive songwriter melds emotional darkness, melancholy, and seething frustration as he reckons with the hauntings of his past: “I was nervous about being too loud, but then it sort of just came out.”

What unravels across 'Parader’s 12 tracks is an introspective autopsy of time as it distorts and folds to inhabit the songwriter’s present. “There are these disjointed snapshots,” he shares, “memories across time popping up amongst this collection of thoughts about what it feels like to be this age and a musician.”

“Parader has legitimate confidence, it’s not me pretending to be anything I’m not,” Henson admits. “It’s maybe just me accepting that part of me is this. It's louder and it has those bigger, louder, rasher sounds, but not from a performative point of view. Maybe I'm accepting that that is a part of me as well.” As the record closes out, final track ‘Performer’ brings us full circle to the question of the album’s title – the two intrinsically linked. As he sings, “I’ll show my scars to you no matter who you are,” Henson acknowledges the emotional pains of being a musician in the public eye, with the relentless march of time a grudging ally in delivering his stories: “I am the parader. The person who parades around showing their wounds for a living.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Don’t I Just
2. Insomnia
3. Lazy Magician (feat. Julia Steiner)
4. Past It
5. Conversation Coach
6. Furl (feat. Danielle Fricke)
7. Loose Ends
8. Operator
9. Tell Me So
10. Tourniquet
11. Day In New York
12. Performer

Two years after ‘Monument’, Keaton Henson comes back with a new studio album, ‘House Party’. About the album, Keaton says : “I wanted to make an upbeat confident pop record about depression and being a performer, written from the viewpoint of an artist who has hollowed himself out over a long career in the name of success, an alternate universe version of me (the guy in the pink suit), who is left empty and lonely from climbing to the top, but is still only able to express these feelings in the language of confident, performative pop songs.”

Henson says that once he knew he was making a pop album, something inside him was allowed to run free. The stakes were somehow lowered. Take, for instance, the blissfully bleary ache of Envy one of several choruses on the record that resound in your head long after the needle reaches the runout groove. Henson says that when he wrote the song, he was trying to channel the fist pumping triumphalism of Britpop. However, that’s not something altogether apparent to anyone listening to the song. What you hear instead is perhaps something closer to the tender consolation songs of Teenage Fanclub. It’s almost as if, in this parallel world, the guy in the pink suit arrestingly depicted on the sleeve of House Party by acclaimed figurative artist Tristan Pigott is starting to fall apart before real life Keaton has fully clocked it.

TRACK LISTING

1. I’m Not There
2. Rain In My Favourite House
3. Envy
4. The Meeting Place
5. Two Bad Teeth
6. Stay
7. Late To You
8. Parking Lot
9. Holiday
10. The Mine
11. Hooray
12. Hide Those Feelings

Keaton Henson’s ‘Fragments EP’ was made as a companion piece to last year’s ‘Monument’ album, written and recorded at the same time.  ‘Monument’ is a fragile, meditative and emotional unravelling of grief in the aftermath of losing his father, and for all its hushed acoustics, ‘Monument’ cocooned its emotion in some beautifully tender melodies and acute observations. It’s a warm and relatable listen. 

On ‘Fragments EP’, whilst the lyrical themes and subjects may stray from ‘Monument’’s poignant subject matter, in its sound and atmosphere, it feels suitably entwined. 

The eight tracks that form the EP orbit a sweeping kaleidoscope of sonic shapes, shades and textures. Keaton’s voice offers lyrics in an almost frozen romanticism. It’s a voice that sounds rooted in turmoil but also of strength. A happy sadness. Bleakly beautiful. 

Julien Baker shares a mic from across the ocean in Australia on ‘Marionette’. A songwriter of due reverence herself, Baker and Keaton share an affinity with the power of hushed words, fizzing melodies and an innate wisdom.  ‘Fragments EP’ and ‘Monument’ are two fine bodies of work by this singular, unique British artist, and two empathetic records of sorrow and strength.

TRACK LISTING

1. A Cassette Interlude
2. Limb
3. Before Growing Old
4. Marionette (with Julien
5. Baker)
6. New Kid
7. Invite
8. No Love Lost
9. For Kiran

Keaton Henson’s new album Monument is a rare thing. It is an album about loss, and dealing with losing the ones we love, but told, in incredibly candid detail, through the aspects of our lives that surround the trauma itself, about love, ageing, recovery, life, seen through the prism of grief.

With the posting of an enigmatic and cryptic goodbye in 2016; Epilogue, Henson’s next project ended up becoming Six Lethargies, a complex and ambitious symphony for string orchestra, dealing with the minutiae of mental illness. He put away the guitar and retreated to his home for three years to compose it. Monument now finds Keaton re-emerging with an album of songs about grief, and how it permeates our lives.

The record began when, having recovered from both Six Lethargies and the circumstances that inspired it, Henson moved from London to the wilds of the English countryside, spending long days outside chopping wood, tending to the grounds, and watching birds of prey soaring above. It was from this remote outpost that he finally felt ready to look at a subject he had been avoiding for his entire songwriting career; the decades long illness, and imminent death of his father, who passed two days before he finished recording the album.

Keaton: “I suppose it is, at its heart, much like my first record; a collection of things I wanted to say, just so they’re out of my system, and not necessarily for anyone else to hear. I made it at home, mostly alone, to the sound of birds and rainstorms, at strange hours of day and night. But, once the bones were recorded, I was somewhat unexpectedly joined by an amazing group of people, who came to musically lift me on their shoulders, and take these unsaid feelings to another plain in terms of sound.”

These people came in the form of Radiohead’s Philip Selway providing drums and percussion, guitars provided by Leo Abrahams, saxophones from composer Charlotte Harding and at one point a full string section.

It culminates in a record that is at once intensely intimate and vulnerable, but carries with it a confidence and elevation in its musical language; the simple up-close picking of Henson’s guitar lifted on a soft bed of electronics and lo-fi tape sound, the moments of joyful acceptance punctuated by soaring drums and woodwinds, that feels like jumping in a cold pool on a warm day.

The sound of tape and VHS are a crucial vein that run throughout the album, carrying the feeling of memory and nostalgia, family and childhood. The subtle recurring use of home video sounds suddenly brings the biographical nature of the album to life, before receding again into the background.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ambulance
2. Self Portrait
3. Ontario
4. Career Day
5. Prayer
6. While I Can
7. Bed
8. The Grand Old Reason
9. Husk
10. Thesis
11. Bygones

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2013 EXCLUSIVE.

One Sided Etched 7" Vinyl of Keaton Henson Exclusive Artwork