Martin Carr — the visionary songwriter, guitarist, filmmaker, and graphic artist best known as the creative force behind The Boo Radleys and Bravecaptain — is back with something genuinely unlike anything in his catalogue. The Cardiff-based artist has shared What Future, the strikingly unconventional title track from his forthcoming album of the same name, out May 1st via his own Sonny Boy Records.
Alongside the single, Carr has unveiled a self-directed animated music video — a fittingly restless visual companion to a track built from what he describes as “distracted beats and messy electronics.” Watch it below.
What Future marks the second single from the album, and if the title track is anything to go by, Carr has pushed himself into genuinely new sonic territory. In his own words:
“I’ve been putting together these sounds for many years but this is the first time where I thought ‘this doesn’t really sound like anything else’ and decided to put it out.“
The music, he explains, isn’t just a stylistic experiment — it’s deeply personal. The shifts in tone and texture mirror his own anxious, hyperactive thinking.
“I have a constant lowkey dread running through my central nervous system, I am prone to paranoia and anxiety and all that feeds into the atmosphere of the album without me having to come up with new ways of expressing myself lyrically. The shifts in tone and texture reflect my thinking, rather than being a stylistic choice.”
Carr cites an eclectic cast of inspirations — RZA, Prefuse 73, Pole, King Tubby, Vernon Elliot, and Eden Ahbez — describing them as “world builders all.” His process is equally idiosyncratic: starting with found sounds (an isolated McCartney bassline, a fragment of a Pretty Things record, a neighbour’s van blaring something that sounds like Mark E. Smith), layering obsessively, then stripping it all back.
“I make a huge mess then I start chipping away at it until it starts to sound like something.“
What’s the backstory?
‘What Future’ follows last year’s ‘The Canton Hours’, a collection of odds and sods recorded in the wake of Carr’s critically acclaimed 2017 solo album ‘New Shapes of Life’ — which Pitchfork called “a suave, sophisticated, rhythmically robust pop record,” while CLASH gave it a 9/10 rave and Record Collector declared it “his finest work since The Boo Radleys.“
Pitchfork has also described Carr as “not only one of the most redoubtable tunesmiths of his generation, but one of its most adventurous sonic architects as well.” ‘What Future’ looks set to back that up.
The album drops May 1st via Sonny Boy Records. Single out now.
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