dream-pop

A year to the day since this went up on Bandcamp. I’d like to claim the timing is deliberate.

Joel Johnston is a producer first, and Autofiction sounds like it. He plays everything here, alone in his Leeds studio, and the surfaces are immaculate: lush, faintly downbeat dream pop on a dry, clean guitar tone he’s spent years dialling in. ‘Ditch’ was the last thing added, after he rediscovered The Glow Pt. 2 and wanted noise at the front. The right call: it hands him a tape motif that runs to the last track.

The influences aren’t hidden. Alex G is the obvious reference point, but I kept hearing Wild Nothing too, particularly Gemini, which never got the credit it deserved. ‘First Day’ is the clearest case.

Johnston was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in 2021, and most writing about the record starts there, this included. Reading last summer’s reviews, the line everyone quotes from ‘Lough’ comes from elsewhere: he’s had emetophobia since childhood, a fear of being sick that hardened into OCD, and he wrote “your mind changed from a fear to a song” partway through a treatment course he hadn’t finished. Hope recorded before the outcome was known.

So: safe songs, comforting. Johnston knows what works and doesn’t push far past it, not a complaint exactly, more an observation about where the ceiling sits. The lyrics are diaristic this time; he used to reach for metaphor. The vocals sit higher in the mix than on The Last Remaining Light. I’d take more of that, and some real experimentation alongside.

Big Long Sun started as Jamie Broughton on his own and is now an eight-piece, though you wouldn’t always guess it from the recordings. Broughton still tracks most of it himself in a Brighton bedroom on a Tascam 244, and the other seven turn up to add detail rather than thicken the mix. love songs and spiritual recollections is their third album in eighteen months, which would normally be cause for suspicion, but the songs don’t sound rushed.

It’s psych-pop with folk-pop instrumentation, and the eight members are used sparingly. ‘heavy (on your mind)’ is a good example: nothing it does is individually complicated, but the song slowly piles up until it sounds full without ever sounding crowded. That restraint runs through most of the record.

The warmth of the playing keeps pulling against the lyrics, which are not warm. Not always dark either: more often aloof and guarded, hinting at something rather than explaining it. Broughton has called one of the singles “a dark, paranoid folk anthem for the spiritually insecure mind,” which gives you the temperature, even when the arrangements are doing their best to disguise it.