Two years after ‘Monument’, Keaton Henson comes back with a new studio album, House Party. About the album, Keaton says: “I wanted to make an upbeat confident pop record about depression and being a performer, written from the viewpoint of an artist who has hollowed himself out over a long career in the name of success, an alternate universe version of me (the guy in the pink suit), who is left empty and lonely from climbing to the top, but is still only able to express these feelings in the language of confident, performative pop songs.” Henson says that once he knew he was making a pop album, something inside him was allowed to run free. The stakes were somehow lowered. Take, for instance, the blissfully bleary ache of Envy –one of several choruses on the record that resound in your head long after the needle reaches the runout groove. Henson says that when he wrote the song, he was trying to channel the fist-pumping triumphalism of Britpop. However, that’s not something altogether apparent to anyone listening to the song. What you hear instead is perhaps something closer to the tender consolation songs of Teenage Fanclub. It’s almost as if, in this parallel world, the guy in the pink suit –arrestingly depicted on the sleeve of House Party by acclaimed figurative artist Tristan Pigott –is starting to fall apart before real-life Keaton has fully clocked it.
