Famous

"Consisting of nine disarmingly honest and devastatingly romantic love songs, Party Album is also a gut-wrenching memoir about sobriety and maturity." - The Quietus

Today Famous shares a new track and video from his forthcoming record, ‘Party Album’, out October 11th via untitled (recs).

Following the previously dropped double single of post-hardcore noise and apocalyptic folk, “God Hold You” / “It Goes On Forever”, today the project, led by South-Londoner Jack Merrett, delivers "What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life" - a sonic ruin for the frenetic and eccentric music to haunt. The new single is tender and ecstatic by turns, punctuated by gigantic riffs, blast beats, and inexorable synths.

Merrett says the track is about “a long searched for happiness that is somehow promised and yet forever out of reach”. “The video,” he continues, “plays with this confusion. We decided to make a trailer for a road movie, never deciding what it was about, only how it would feel”.

Coming to prominence as a part of the celebrated South-London Brixton Windmill scene alongside Black Country, New Road and Black Midi, Famous 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.

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”.