Famous

Coming to prominence as a part of the celebrated South-London Brixton Windmill scene alongside Black Country, New Road and Black Midi, the group quickly drew recognition for its boundary-pushing, post- post-punk sound. 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.’

As Famous worked out the patterns to its music that grew wider and deeper with every song and new line-up, its mystique grew – something Merrett identifies with the musical heroes of his youth, as he explains, laughing but with unfeigned sincerity, “all my life, I have had a certain idea of rock music.”. Adorning himself with mythic, Jim Morrison-esque monikers like “The King of the Dark Time”, drawing from scattered cultural references ranging from BoJack Horseman episodes to the Book of Revelation, and playing rooftop concerts in London to nobody but the twilight sky. It all laid the suspicion that Famous was either constructing or destroying something huge. Ultimately both were true.

“[After The Valley], I fell into something of a crisis of confidence. I began to question whether this was really what I wanted to do”. The rumination coincided with a broader personal crisis that appeared to be telling the twenty-six year old that perhaps the party was over. Merrett became fixated on “what album I would make if I wasn’t concerned about anyone but me. This became a jumping-off-point for all of us”.

The resulting answer, Famous’s 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”. 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. Ultimately, it’s Merrett’s own reflections that best summarise the complexity and simplicity of what Famous has achieved with the record: “it’s trying to sketch the pattern of the universal onto a very flawed and partial human life. I think that’s the stupidly audacious thing that the whole album is about”.