An Intoxicating Experience – STEVIE-RAY LATHAM

”Head down, back to the wall, blue face cause heaven is cold…” sings Latham, his lurking vocal hollow with the beckoning call of the great beyond. Hallmarked with the hammond-organ howls and warped fretboard trippery of a bygone era, “Gashouse” casts a brooding silhouette that will haunt and hook long after the needle has departed the groove. 

Drawing on comparisons to Kurt Vile, Blake Mills, Nick Drake & Neil Young, StevieRay Latham is quickly making himself a name to be known with his distinctively dark, melodic, art-folk compositions. With influences ranging from movie scores and sound-art to pre-war Jazz and existentialist literature, the young singer-songwriter signed to the independent At The Helm Records whilst he was still at Art School and since graduating has released two albums, worked on a series of collaborations with visual artists, played festivals and headlined shows across Europe. Receiving airplay from BBC Radio 6 Music and Radio 2, over the years Latham has also been championed by media including Line of Best Fit, Q & Folk Radio UK.

New single “Gashouse” will feature on his upcoming, ‘Letters from Suburbia’; a record which will complete a trilogy of EPs released over the past 18 months. This collection of deeply poetic songs follows last year’s gritty, driving ‘Nomads Of Industrial Suburbia’ and 2019’s experimental-indie release, ‘Suburbia’. 

Greek mythology and Gothic Blues collide on the profound 8 and half minute epic ‘Dionysus Blues’, ‘Gashouse’ marries 60’s Garage Rock with tales of La Résistance, whilst ‘Letter from Suburbia’ is a delicately picked folk-song that grows with the horns and percussion of a marching band. ‘Don’t Make Me Love You In Vain’ is a melancholy ballad that emerges from an ambient soundscape before melting into the EP’s atmospheric spoken- word coda, ‘Transient Circles’.