Adult Jazz

With their new album So Sorry So Slow due April 26th via Spare Thought, today Adult Jazz are sharing their new single 'Marquee'. Opening with a theatrical piano line, ‘Marquee’ pleads its case to be the lightest offering from the new record so far. But time signatures stumble into themselves, tangle with Maxwell Sterling’s double bass feature and loosen, as Harry Burgess’s falsetto springs between stepping stones, bright and menacing. 
 
Across its six minutes, ‘Marquee’ excavates the strange spaces between containment and expression – an anxiety-riddled caged bird, a law-abiding citizen, a tethered dog pissing for territory. Always, there’s the impression of another song bubbling beneath the song – some dormant lava reawakening, a darker thread spooling its chamber pop dispositions into uncomfortable restraint. 
 
“I think this is essentially a wedding song - written after a spate of going to lots of weddings, feeling happy, lonely, and after 2014, ostensibly welcomed into that institution,” explains Burgess. “I was thinking about ceremonies that involve staking out ground, beating the bounds, and hoping for an idea of community broader than a series of sealed family units.”
 
“An early idea for the album artwork was the image of a tattered wedding marquee in a stark landscape - which came from some lines from a thing I wrote for a little book called Toffee Hammer back in 2018. A couple of pieces in that book were pitting gay rights against climate breakdown, documenting our historical culpability for disaster/extreme weather etc.. (à la that UKIP councillor in 2014, sodom and gomorrah) for a bit of fun. It was mainly as a laugh, but also how thinking about any progress feels a bit strange when the ecological death knell is ringing!”
 
Containing some of the band’s most abrasive but gentle, beautiful and melismatic work to date, So Sorry So Slow has many defining characteristics: romance, panic, devotion and remorse, threaded together by an intentionally laser-focused love. It’s deeply personal, bruised and candid in its expressions of tenderness, and deeply pained in its concurrent reflections of ecological regret. Across its hour-long runtime, a delicate, frenetic energy and glacial heaviness coexist, the band pitting those paces against one another. In their richly experimental timbre, dancing strings and fluttering falsettos prang against a bed of brass drones like a wounded bird.
 
So Sorry So Slow comes out 26th April 2024 on Spare Thought, mixed by Fabian Prynn at 4AD Studios and mastered by Alex Wharton at Abbey Road.
 
Adult Jazz is Harry Burgess, Tim Slater, Steven Wells and Tom Howe.