Adult Jazz have announced their first LP in a decade. So Sorry So Slow lands on April 26 via Spare Thought. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the new song ‘Suffer One’, which follows the recently released ‘Dusk Song’ and features a string arrangement by Owen Pallet. Check it out and find the album’s details below.
“We recorded the cello and guitar together at Konk, with no-metronome, to get a loose shifting rhythm – then spent time adding splashes of other things in the studio,” the band shared in a statement about ‘Suffer One’. “The final stage was Owen Pallett’s string arrangement, and viola + violin playing. We’ve been listening to Owen’s music since we were 15, and have always admired their songwriting so we were incredibly honoured they were up for it. The strings lent this final surge of energy that helped us feel it was done.”
They added: “The song itself is about romance and seeking connection- and the sometimes terror baked into that,” they added. “It was one of the earlier tracks the lyrics were completed on, and it ends with a bit of pathetic fallacy indulgence, which I think in hindsight teed up a lot of the conflation of the personal with the ecological in the rest of the record.”
Discussing the process behind the album, vocalist Harry Burgess said: “We started writing in 2017 and began recording in 2018. We genuinely thought it might be finished in 2018! But things kept developing and, having resolutely not struck while the iron was hot, there was no real external push to rush things after that, so we just kept letting things shift and unfold until it felt right. Listening back to my voice notes it’s nice to notice that there are fragments of ideas from the whole period 2017-2023 which have shaped the record.” He continued:
I usually have objects as kind of totems for ideas. The album initially started out to do with performance… [the totem] was a head mic, one of the subtle skin-tone ones, discreet on the forehead of a West End star. A number of the first songs in their original forms were almost musical theatre piano ballads. I think that was really a device to write about my life as the ‘main character’ (pre internet-speak reframing): regrets about romance, relationships – unsustainable relationships with the self and others.
However, once we started writing, the ideas about unsustainable personal relationships, loving unevenly and heartbreak conflated with a more expressly ecological regret. Like contending with big feelings of loss, endings, beauty, desolation, and with how much joy the earth contains in it. Feeling so much gratitude bound up in waves of sadness. Maybe witnessing a slow-motion goodbye to all that, or its last gasps. I love the earth and the life it supports so much. I love how ecosystems fit together – even the brutal stuff. It may be basic to say, but now is the time to be laser focused on that love. I was thinking about human centrality on earth, us as the ‘main character’, the way that is served by faith and romanticism, and the subsequent disingenuous understandings of our position in the ecosystem, as only stewards somehow, rather than subjects. The totems at this point: a herald’s horn, lorry inner tubes, archaeological tools. I guess from doom, industry, history respectively.
Now I would say the record is about gripping. Totems being: crampons, rope, drips, desalination equipment, accruing various survival tech. I think gripping sums up both of the threads. There’s the emotionally correct clinging to the earth that is the substrate of everything we value, or the delusional clinging to our imagined dominant position. But also the practical, technological aspects of creating a sustainable relationship, of remaining here. Then I think of romance again.
So Sorry So Slow Cover Artwork:
So Sorry So Slow Tracklist:
1. Bleat Melisma
2. Suffer One
3. y-rod
4. No Relief
5. Plenary
6. Marquee
7. Dusk Song
8. Earth of Woems
9. No Sentry
10. Ben
11. I Was Surprised
12. Windfarm
