Lewis Watson has a gift for drawing you into his orbit. Early on in his career, the Oxford folk-pop artist built a buzz around his YouTube covers and stage-diving antics while showing us how emotionally resonant music can be when it’s peeled back to its core. Now on his fourth studio album, Blue Skies Grey, he’s matured and evolved but his game plan remains the same: to turn fleeting feelings into universal reflections.
Intimate and raw, each Lewis Watson album is a study in human connection, disconnection, and the crossed wires that boobie-trap our hearts. To put it simply, Blue Skies Grey is a collection of songs that capture how romance feels. “It felt like I was pressing play on a voice recording of a therapy session,” Watson shares of the writing process. “To have loved and lost is probably something that almost everybody has felt, and I do think that music is a great language for exploring that,” he adds.
By turns, Blue Skies Grey—released on 7th February via Nettwerk—can be heartbreaking and devastating, like how it lurches from the tear-streaked balladry of “Wasted Heart” to the skywards pick-me-up of “Bolt from the Blue” in one fell swoop. On the latter, Watson compares the intensity of his love to a lighting strike, propelled by “a million volts” over a gale of fist-pumping indie-rock. “It’s written about being pulled from a dark place by somebody in a movie-like-love-at-first-sight kind of situation,” he explains.
Blue Skies Grey is the latest chapter for the Preston-born, Bicester-raised singer-songwriter whose trademark style of rousing vocals and acoustic songcraft has generated two UK-charting albums (2014’s major-label debut The Morning and Midnight, his second offering, released on Cooking Vinyl in 2017) and seen him collaborate with artists including Gabrielle Aplin, dodie, and Everything Everything. This new LP follows 2020 full-length the love that you want, on which Watson introduced electronic elements as well as serving as a co-producer alongside Richard Wilkinson. In 2024, he released a new version of The Morning, The Morning After, which was entirely self-produced, following his recent self-taught excursions into production. Watson is keen to spend more time at the production controls in future, but for now, he’s leaping into the new year with a bruising collection of folk-pop that unfolds like a travelogue of his journey through life’s twists and turns.