Jack Peñate’s back, and this time it’s spiritual. Part of his decade away from music was spent – consults notes – indulging in mind-expanding ritual, looking to mysticism and mythology for answers, and reading Hesse, Rilke and Huxley. The suspicion that he’s gone full ayahuasca holiday is further heightened by the news that the album’s closer, Swept to the Sky, was written “because there was a sound that reminded me of a feeling I had being in the jungle while in Peru”. Shall we consult the lyrics to see what feeling that might have been? “Then a mist from the lovers of sin / Slowly crept to my skull through my skin / And my body was carried up high / And I felt myself swept to the sky.” No more questions, your honour.
That’s where Peñate gets torrid, but there’s plenty more of the faintly spiritual about After You. On Loaded Gun, he tells us, “I’m so high, I’m divine.” On Murder, he’s apologising to those he hurt, and opening his arms to those who left him stranded. By GMT, he’s citing his sources: “Living on the river like I’m Herman Hesse / But I was learning nothing til the lesson ends.” It’s on Gemini, though, that he touches the emotions his spiritual guide persona doesn’t manage, when a limpid piano precedes Peñate’s uncle reading lines from The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb by Mervyn Peake, Peñate’s grandfather.
After You is a tasteful record – at times it’s exactly the soft, melancholy, adult house pop they play in the chic bar at 7pm in every Netflix drama you’ve ever watched – but it’s also got tunes, and Peñate has also finally lost all his vocal mannerisms, so you’re not distracted from those tunes. Loaded Gun sounds so accurately and beautifully like a lost Pink Floyd ballad that it’s a wonder it doesn’t come with a note about Palestine from Roger Waters. Swept to the Sky is the phone-torches-aloft blockbuster in excelsis. And there are great hooks thrown in almost casually – the little four-note pattern that nags away in Cipralex, the creeping bassline of Murder. But it sounds a little cautious and contained, like a high-end beige sofa, so understated it blends into the background.
