Sometimes at night, when mark william lewis is feeling overwhelmed, he visits the banks of the Thames River and skips rocks across its surface. “Each stone,” he says, “is another thought sent spinning into the water.” It’s a potent ritual, one you can almost hear in the songwriter’s opaque, introspective guitar ballads. In a dusky baritone, he offers meditations on heartbreak, connection, and the heavy burden of living. Half-thoughts and fractured images flit through his delicate songs; elusive truths flash out for a moment, then disappear into the black.
On his self-titled new album—the first non-film-related release on tastemaking movie studio A24’s music imprint—he largely continues in this mode. The record’s 12 tracks are fragmented, transient, and unsettled, anchored only by lewis’ steady voice. From the first moments of opener “Still Above,” lewis sounds ruminative and uncertain: pleading for peace, mulling old memories, and looking ahead to a “restless journey home.” Over gasping horns and echoing electric guitar lines that sound like a Blue Nile record playing at the wrong speed, he casts a lonely figure, wandering in a world he can’t fully connect to.
The mood is anxious and agitated throughout: Even “Tomorrow Is Perfect,” a comparatively breezy song by lewis’ standards, feels tightly wound, as he murmurs of fanged hounds, unfriendly doctors, and “the brutal bridge of betrayal.”
On “Spit,” he sings ominously of illness and mistakes and “blood in your spit every fucking day.” On the distorted, otherworldly “Brain,” he wants to make amends, but even in those pleas, his thoughts are clouded by doubt and cynicism. Trying to make literal sense out of the lyrics—elusive and illusory as they are—is tricky, but the picture they paint is of an unrelentingly bleak headspace. Still, these songs never tip into total darkness. “Still Above,” though sleepily paced, toys with shimmery sophistipop textures. “Seventeen” is yearning and gloomy lyrically, but its lithe acoustic strumming isn’t a world away from Alex G’s more dewy-eyed ballads. And then there’s lewis’ voice, which he never pushes too far beyond a murmur or a whisper, adding comfort and peace to every word he sings. Even the heaviest songs sound like daydreams.
In some ways, this is precisely the sort of songs he’s been writing since he emerged from the off-kilter London scene that produced friends and fellow travelers like Bar Italia, Double Virgo, and Still House Plants. Like those bands—and like an even longer lineage of UK pop experimenters from Talk Talk to Bark Psychosis to Dean Blunt—he is fond of rock and folk conventions. (He employs a wheezy harmonica across several songs on Mark William Lewis, in part because of his dad’s appreciation for Bob Dylan and Neil Young.) But he never uses them in expected ways. Nor does he really allow himself easy catharsis or anthemic choruses—even though he has demanded exactly that from the avant-garde scene he once was a part of. “Just give me a chorus, please,” he recently told The Fader. “Take a risk and don’t be afraid to say something revealing about how you feel.”
Ironically, lewis’ own music is rarely that straightforward—to its benefit. These songs are full of feelings, but lewis stops short of making anything that feels truly vulnerable, at least in a traditional way. The whats and the whys and proper nouns that spark these musings are deliberately blurry, but they clearly are deeply felt. Each cryptic whisper is punctuated by a spiraling guitar lead or a wheezy, gasping instrumental backdrop. The cracks and fissures between images, the pauses and false starts—each fragment hints at abstract conclusions, and universal truths just out of reach. If you listen closely, you can hear whole worlds in every ellipsis.
