Blaenavon frontman Ben Gregory goes solo, announces debut album ‘episode’

Blaenavon frontman Ben Gregory has announced his debut solo album, ‘episode’.

Gregory first said that he had made a solo record when Blaenavon’s breakup was announced back in November, with the explanation that “we’ve all got cool new stuff to do”. His bandmates, Frank Wright and Harris McMillan, are now playing with the band Organ Morgan.

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Now, Gregory has shared more details about the record, which is due for release on April 7. “Everything on ‘episode’ comes back to my struggle to interpret, or reinterpret, my life and its core relationships, after having my concept of reality revoked,” he said in a press release. “This may sound dramatic, but it’s hard to know if you can trust how you feel about a partner, a situation, a future, when you’ve sat in a hospital bed, torn a newspaper to shreds, sat back and watched it put itself back together.”

Gregory had spent time in a psychiatric hospital back in 2019, after which he had been forced to stop writing music altogether, “partially because I found it too painful, but also because I wasn’t really functioning well enough to be creative.” When he felt able to write again, ‘episode’ began to come together.

Along with the announcement, Gregory has released its second single, ‘manifest*’. He said: “‘manifest*’ is about feeling fated to certain situations and lacking control over your own position in life. It looks towards a potential future that is desired but unlikely, focused on a partner and an imagined future family. There are elements of a slightly tragic fixation in there. The narrative retelling is real but it questions itself and cannot commit to painting an impossible future. The attempt was to portray this process of recollection, because people choose how they shape their own memories.”

Check out the track below:

The tracklist for ‘episode’ is as follows:

1. ‘storm of conversation’
2. ‘blue sea blue’
3. ‘((fall away ’till morn..))’
4. ‘manifest*’
5. ‘deathbed hangover’
6. ‘mother’s son’
7. ‘smoke’
8. ‘god bless you’

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