It’s the dawn of a new year, an existential time in which many of us attempt to approach our lives with a renewed purpose, which often involves us eating liquidised vegetables for every meal. It’s a well timed return for the former Beta Band frontman Steve Mason then, whose track Planet Sizes is an introspective and universal exploration into the human condition, and sounds like an optimistic exhalation.
Inspired by his relocation from the London city to the Brighton sea, Planet Sizes is taken from his new album, Meet The Humans, which is out on Double Six on 26 February. While its uncluttered leading track gradually unfurls into a celestial acoustic melody, the rest of the album sees the songwriter experiment with dance, pop, folk, dub and deep house influences. Following his “double political concept album” Monkey Minds In The Devil’s Time and his debut solo album, Boys Outside, a collection of songs that wrestle with the end of a relationship and his subsequent breakdown, this third album was recorded with Elbow keyboardist and producer Craig Potter, and is a move towards a more simple ethic. It is “an album where each song is a separate entity, where there is no great narrative running through it,” he says.
Planet Sizes is accompanied by an animated video directed by Anna Ginsburg, premiered below.
