Bullion releases new studio album ‘Affection’ + focus track ‘World_Train’

Avant-pop auteur Bullion has today released his new album, Affection, via Ghostly International. It’s a career highlight from the accomplished songwriter and producer, casting familiar pop sounds in a forward-thinking light. Following singles with Carly Rae Jepsen and Panda Bear, today, he shares the single ‘World_train’, which features acclaimed Belgian artist Charlotte Adigéry. While best known for her thoughtful electronic music, the end result of their collaboration is folky and rambling. Adigéry and Jenkins duet over a motorik hoedown. ‘World_train’ offers a wonderfully bizarre snapshot of an album that thrives due to creative restlessness.

On the track, Charlotte Adigéry shares: “I’ve always been an admirer of Bullion’s work. Nothing sounds like it! It’s refreshing, uncompromising and soothing at the same time.”

Nathan Jenkins is an enduring cult figure of electronic music; a producer and songwriter quietly to be found connecting artists, genre and UK subculture. His credits range from Carly Rae Jepsen, Ben Howard, Nilüfer Yanya and Avalon Emerson’s breakout album & The Charm to records for Westerman and Joviale. Bullion’s celebrated solo releases, meanwhile, have run parallel on Young, The Trilogy Tapes, Jagjaguwar and his own DEEK Recordings. It’s a creative red-thread Bullion ties together on his surprise new album, Affection – a warm, occasionally off-kilter and beautifully realised pop record that’s bold enough to step from behind-the-scenes and show affection in public.

Bullion’s music has always been difficult to pin down, but entirely distinctive – and on Affection, its rich pleasures are in hearing how this uncompromising approach is strengthened, in part, by softening. The album wonders-aloud about the meaning of intimacy, in relationship to others and the self. Masculinity and other contemporary concerns are punctuated by old-world charms, found in the ‘hat stands and watches’ of World_train. Influences stretch from morning swims to adolescent fears and a book of poems his Dad wrote as a young man, in songs that are tender if not always true of Nathan himself. Affection ultimately asks how we understand people, but in being more vulnerable at least attempts to care a little less about what they think, too.

Taking your own advice is integral to Bullion’s latest album, where Nathan applies what he’s encouraged fellow artists to do in the studio for years: be open to adventure. Lead single Rare, for instance, emerged during sessions for Carly Rae Jepsen’s recent album in Toronto, whereas previous single ‘A City’s Never’ with Panda Bear was written and completed entirely over DMs. In blurring the observational with the introspective, Affection’s avant-pop touch abandons categorisation. The albums lyrics are as unguarded and devotional as they are inquisitive of alternative ways of being, signing off with ‘being still is hard to do’. Nathan has mastered his sound, but life – in its expectations, contradictions, impulses and desires – remains impossible to control. Affection is an unassumingly powerful pursuit of a more compassionate form of confidence, in which Bullion cements his place in the present-day by entirely surrendering to the future.

Bullion: Affection

Tracklist:
1. A City’s Never w/ Panda Bear
2. Affection
3. Rare w/ Carly Rae Jepsen
4. Your Father
5. The Flooding
6. Cinch
7. World_train w/ Charlotte Adigéry
8. Cavalier
9. Once, In a Borrowed Car
10. Open Hands
11. 40 Waves
12. Hard To Do