Jack Cheshire - Interloper (2024)

Jack Cheshire unveils his sixth album, ‘INTERLOPER’, conjuring multi-layered, mesmeric psych pop with cinematic flourishes, hypnotic rhythms and hallucinatory imagery to dazzling effect. Following the interstellar trajectory of his last album 'FRACTAL FUTURE PLAYS', this new work was written & recorded by Jack between March 2021 - August 2022 with drums and percussion from co-producer and long-time collaborator Jon Scott (GoGo Penguin, Mulatu Astatke). Mixed by Shuta Shinoda (Hot Chip, Anna Meredith, Ghostpoet) the record features guest spots from Danny Keane (cello on The Swimmer), Fini Bearman (vocals on Let Got Lightly & The Swimmer) and Andrea Di Biase (double bass on The Swimmer). A bold and prismatic collection, this new record has many colours, shapes and dimensions, with much to reveal on repeated listens.

'INTERLOPER' is an album about belonging or not belonging and all that entails. Living on an island, aware of this insidious creep toward something ugly, and the people who say 'if you don't like it then leave'. So you wonder; where would I go? If I arrive somewhere new to lay down roots, will I just be displacing the people who are already there? Part of the next wave of gentrification, a proliferation of interlopers jacking up rents and taking over. You're conscious of everything being up for sale, carved up and sold off, accumulated by bad agents; the land owners, the landlords, the profiteers who have been given licence to run amok. You wonder how you can channel your fury at the architects of all this. You wonder what you're made of. You wonder who you are and where you're going.

Cheshire's timeless sixth outing weaves visions of lost futures and social alienation as viewed through the prism of cerebral static. Cheshire has always deftly mined his subconscious, an artist unafraid to turn off the filters and experiment, but there is an immediacy to these new compositions, a confidence and maturity that is at once intoxicating and striking. From the first hazy, oneiric drones of Transmigrations ‘INTERLOPER’ casts a spell that does not relent. Through the widescreen, loping pastoral psychedelia of Valium, the lysergic polyrhythms of Heavy Rotations, the ominous overtones and lush swelling strings on The Swimmer, the magical field recordings and soft croon on Fall Out, Fall In, this record is a transportive, wondrous brew.

Partly inspired by B. Caitlings visionary 'Vorrh Trilogy’, about an ancient sentient forest, human greed and consumption, psychic and physical colonisation and the mysterious power of nature, Cheshire devoured these books and was then drawn to the forest itself, embarking on the first of many long walks through Epping Forest in early 2021.

'The forest ushered us in and we forgot ourselves for a while. Beautiful desolate stretches with old gnarled branches, glorious colours and something magic about the stillness; that sense that you're not alone, an atmosphere. Touching the earth and being conscious of the network of mycelium connecting everything underground, listening to the trees speak. I felt as though I reconnected with this beautiful, timeless, benign force which reminded me that we're hard-wired to the universe, built from the same matter.'

Meticulously constructed over eighteen months, his latest album is the distillation of the human experience over a singular period of time. Bewildered by the fever dream of toxic governance, cocooned isolation and doom scrolling, Jack Cheshire was fuelled by monomania to inhabit his work in the most immersive way; to experiment and get lost deep within it. The result is a bewitching trip, and arguably his best record yet.