Adult Jazz

Today, Leeds-based experimental four-piece Adult Jazz announce "Dusk Song", their first new music in eight years, an ululation of grief that settles somewhere in the thicket between their debut album Gist Is and follow up EP Earrings Off. The band have also announced they will play a London show at ICA on 24th October. 

Singer Harry Burgess’s Meredith Monk-like vocalisations seed and spiral around Tim Slater’s brass drones. “It’s loosely about slowness and panic coexisting,” explains Burgess, “and not really being able to comprehend those paces alongside each other when it comes to how to respond to the climate crisis.” As an image evoked, it’s bare hands frantically shovelling dirt, searching uselessly for questions/answers, a headtorch, the overgrowth. It’s a song that bears a cloying, sickening melancholy. The band, a creature caught in the searchlight, startled and comprehending. 

On the visuals, Burgess added "I shot the video with my cousin in a river on boxing day 2022, after a day of festive comfort. It was freezing. We were both in the river and there had been a lot of rain. We had the alarm/flash setting on a camping light and we filmed in slow mo in one take. He is wearing these lorry inner tubes across him like a tunic - something Tim came up with on a stag do no less, and has stuck visually -  and a cowl I got from Etsy.”

Hello, how are you? It’s been a long time. Adult Jazz has been teasing a follow-up to their debut album Gist Is almost yearly since that record arrived, out of nowhere but fully formed, bright and beautiful in 2014. The cult status it’s attained since speaks to the playful sincerity it spun, grappling with a back-and-forth(-and-back) between religion, gender and desire; a conflict between liberation and tradition, language and communication; between frontman Harry Burgess’s sexuality and the teachings of 90s Christianity. But any thought of grandeur is mistaken. Burgess, speaking to the Guardian at the time, explains simply of the record’s theme, that “definitiveness can be painful.”
 
Musically, Gist Is recalls the heavy but heavenly slow-motion of Arthur Russell, taut but expansive, with a purposeful arhythmic messiness, occasionally resolving into otherworldly falsetto. Laced with the same era-defining weird-pop sensibility of late ‘00s indie rock, Gist Is stood out from its peers, wrapped in musical circlets that disarmed and welcomed with every other beat. It found unlikely acclaim amongst publications, musicians and listeners alike, inviting remixes from Shabazz Palaces and (later) Jenny Hval. A performance in Reykjavik even moved Björk to write about the band for Art In America magazine, and David Byrne booked them to play his Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre in 2015.
 
At best a distant relation to AnCo, Dirty Projectors and Grizzly Bear – bands whose albums Gist Is slotted gladly beside, but who never truly represented what the band was – their follow-up EP Earrings Off! staked out new territory, pushing Adult Jazz into harsher, shapeshifting electronics. Released on tastemaker label Tri Angle in 2016, it was explicitly queer(er), more polarising and delighted in its dance-don’t-dance giddiness. Writing credits followed for Okay Kaya and Moses Sumney, most notably contributing alongside Oneohtrix Point Never to ‘Cut Me’, a standout from Sumney’s 2020 album græ. But what Adult Jazz was, was also a group of friends who had drifted geographically apart, who had started jobs and families, and had found a pattern to life outside music. It led to their output being slow – at times, comically so.
 
Nonetheless, a return to the stage in 2022 with two nights at King’s Place confirmed what many thought: despite Adult Jazz’s relative discretion, a deep fondness had been constant for the band and their music. Beyond the over-inflated prices their records continue to reach on Discogs, it was an appreciation best found in the direct messages, dance routines and wedding songs, tattoos, and reinterpretations continually shared with the band during their silence. There was even a master’s thesis about them.
 
But starting at the start is a shame for a band who’s spent a decade shifting away from it. The recording never stopped. The writing never stopped. The process remained very much alive. So then, let’s start here. 

Adult Jazz is Harry Burgess (vocals, synth, programming), Tim Slater (trombone), Steven Wells (guitar) and Tom Howe (synth, programming).

Previous praise for Adult Jazz:
“genuinely brave, hard-won but never worthy; often brutal, sometimes disarmingly whimsical, but always rapturous[…] Out of nowhere, fully formed: utterly extraordinary.” – The Quietus
“filled with intricate, idea-crammed, expectation-defying compositions.” – NPR 
“a gentle flow of melismatic, often beautiful melody takes center stage.” – Pitchfork 
“one of 2014’s hidden gems: a playfully brainy art-rock confection of zigzagging guitars, string squalls, marimba and trombone over which Harry sings songs about sex, oppression and gender confusion in a fluttering falsetto.” – The Guardian
“an album without boundaries – lose yourself in it.” – The Line of Best Fit
“it’s clear Adult Jazz will be inspiring their own army of rip-offs before long.” – NME 
“an urgent conversation, a record driven by compulsion; fortunately, tuning in to its internal dialogue is a pleasure.” – Mojo 
“a soulful, joyous record reveals itself.” – Q Magazine