Is It?

In March 2022, Ben Howard was sat in his garden when he found himself unable to think clearly, form sentences or speak for almost an hour. A month later, after the same thing happened again, the Ivor Novello Award-winning singer-songwriter learned he’d suffered two TIAs (transient ischemic attacks – known as mini-strokes). “It was out of the blue,” says the 35 year-old. “It was a confusing time.”

That June, after a month of inconclusive hospital tests Howard and his band returned to Le Manoir de Léon recording studio in south-west France, where they’d previously worked on his acclaimed third album ‘Noonday Dream’.

“We went in and put down ten songs in ten days, then spent the rest of the year tinkering with them”. The record was produced by Bullion, known for his work on Westerman’s ‘Your Hero Is Not Dead’ and Orlando Weeks ‘Hop Up’. Howard says, “We worked through the heatwave, the air conditioning broke, after what had happened I was so tired in the afternoons that I slept a lot. We just played solidly and slept, they was no time for retrospection”.

The result is ‘Is It’, a lush, sonically splintered album which captures Howard working through those moments of seismic shift. “I found it impossible not to dwell on the absurdity of it, that with one tiny clot, one can lose all faculties. It really ate into the writing of the record”.

The songs range from the peaceful quotidian Days of Lantana, to cut up samples and driven beats of Walking Backwards, the formers’ pitched and warped Linda Thompson chorus reminiscent of Malcolm Mclaren´s ‘Madame Butterfly’.

Moonraker, a song about climbing in the Guadarrama mountains touches on the meditational, while in the cyclical Richmond Avenue Howard talks of shared childhood moments with his father.

There are colourful, left-field production choices throughout- a staple of Bullion – but with a twist

“We really bonded over records in the studio” he says. “Nathan has an incredible ear and catalogue of sampled beats and rhythms which quickly became the bedrock…There were contributing factors also. Our mainstay drummer Kyle lives in Seattle and as we made the record on the fly we just leaned into drum-machine world, and really left almost all of that side of things up to Nathan.”