Recent episodes of Table Manners, the podcast Jessie Ware co-hosts along with her mom, Lennie, have begun with a short advert for Ware’s new album: listeners, it advises, can get 10% off by preordering Superbloom utilizing a particular code. The proven fact that the advert is directing site visitors from Ware’s podcast to her music feels barely telling. As aspect hustles go, Table Manners has proved terribly profitable, attracting A-list visitors: Margot Robbie, Jeremy Allen White, Paul McCartney, Robert De Niro. Indeed, it’s proved so profitable that it scarcely looks as if a aspect hustle in any respect: in 2026, Ware might be higher often called a podcaster than a singer. Hats off to her: in an unsure period, when rock and pop artists are effectively suggested to have a backup plan, there’s one thing vastly spectacular about how massive Ware’s has turn out to be. Still, there lurks the hazard of her music seeming an afterthought: like the 10% off advert, one thing to get out of the approach earlier than the more critical enterprise of having fun with banana bread with Lisa Kudrow.
You can hear the affect of Table Manners on Superbloom in a literal sense: a monitor referred to as Automatic incorporates a deep-voiced spoken-word look from Euphoria star Colman Domingo, beforehand a visitor on the podcast. It’s additionally an album marked by a way of doubling down. Ware’s third album in a row to mine a disco-pop hybrid, it’s additionally the most straightforwardly retro of the trio, sanding away the sheen of futuristic electronica discovered on 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? and 2023’s That! Feels Good! in favour of lush orchestration: even the most synth-heavy tracks right here converse much less of the current than they do the early 80s post-disco boogie style.
It additionally considerably amps up each its predecessors’ USP, combining camp with grownup pop. “I’m a lover, a freak and a mother,” she sang on 2023’s Pearls; right here, you get to listen to her three youngsters on the ballad 16 Summers, its lyrical theme not one million miles away from Abba’s Slipping Through My Fingers. If Pearls has the trace of a present tune about it, Don’t You Know Who I Am? goes full Shirley Bassey, albeit accompanied by a four-to-the-floor beat. “I need a wood-chopping guy giving love,” she sings on a monitor referred to as Sauna: the proven fact that it’s preceded by a wildly melodramatic instrumental intro referred to as Chariots of Love is likely to be solely coincidental, slightly than a understanding reference to Chariots, as soon as the UK’s largest homosexual sauna, but you wouldn’t put cash on it. Debuted in 2024 onstage at Glastonbury’s legendary queer membership NYC Downlow, Ride marries “come be my cowboy” lyrics to the sound of a whip cracking and a pattern of the whistle from Ennio Morricone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme. Anyone with out an especially excessive threshold for the deliberately cheesy could take into account galloping off into the sundown lengthy earlier than it ends.
But if Superbloom feels much less a growth than a retrenchment – the work of an artist who now is aware of precisely who her viewers are and is more than completely happy to cater for them – that shouldn’t stand as a judgment on its high quality. Grownup, disco-infused pop is a crowded market, but Ware has persistently distinguished herself by the classiness of what she does, and the sense that she has nice style, actually loves and understands her supply materials and surrounds herself with likeminded collaborators. That’s as evident as ever on Superbloom, an album that, for all its kitschy moments, could be very effectively written and effectively made. It lacks a banger fairly as simple as its predecessor’s Free Yourself – a track that, in a sane world, would have been No 1 for months – but it undoubtedly doesn’t need for excellent melodies or choruses. The string preparations scrupulously keep away from glitterball cliches: as an alternative, they are delightfully haunted by the ghost of Chicago’s psychedelic soul maestro Charles Stepney, his opulent affect significantly obvious on the title monitor and No Consequences. The thrillingly spare sound and rattling percussion of Mr Valentine evokes one other post-disco growth, the Paradise Garage-approved punk funk of Liquid Liquid and ESG. Like the impassioned ferocity of Ware’s vocals – she sounds as if she means it, even on a track as daft as Ride – it’s a world away from the cheesy 70s evening signifiers of the much less clever practitioners in her area.
Clearly Superbloom can’t ship the jolt of What’s Your Pleasure?, an album that represented a definite pivot away from Ware’s earlier pursuit of normal mainstream pop success (manufacturing from Benny Blanco, co-writes with Ed Sheeran) and her discovering a lane that suited her completely. If Superbloom is the sound of her staying in that lane, it’s a minimum of one which she dominates comfortably. And if pop have been to lose her solely to the world of podcasting, it might be a pity.
This week Alexis listened to
Paul Weller – What Was I Made For?
From the compilation Weller at the BBC Vol 2, the deeply unbelievable and surprisingly transferring sound of the 67-year-old’s heartfelt tackle Billie Eilish’s contribution to the Barbie soundtrack, in the course of remodeling it right into a meditation on ageing and loss.
