Ben Gregory has announced his Debut Album episode will come out on April 7th via Transgressive (Julia Jacklin). In 2019 Blaenavon, the beloved UK band with whom he released two acclaimed albums, was dissolving and Gregory was receiving treatment in psychiatric hospitals. The album began to come together during his recovery. With breath-taking instrumentals and dark, insightful lyrics, Gregory – with the help of producer and old friend Blaine Harrison of Mystery Jets and engineer Matt Twaites – pushed his music to genre-bending limits. Ahead of the album’s release, Gregory has shared the album track “manifest.*”

Says Ben on the album: ‘Everything on “Episode” comes back to my struggle to interpret, or reinterpret, my life and its core relationships, after having my concept of reality revoked. This may sound dramatic, but it’s hard to know if you can trust how you feel about a partner, a situation, a future, when you’ve sat in a hospital bed, torn a newspaper to shreds, sat back and watched it put itself back together.’

“”manifest*” is about feeling fated to certain situations and lacking control over your own position in life. It looks towards a potential future that is desired but unlikely, focused on a partner and an imagined future family. There are elements of a slightly tragic fixation in there. The narrative retelling is real but it questions itself and cannot commit to painting an impossible future. The attempt was to portray this process of recollection, because people choose how they shape their own memories.”

It is impossible to separate Ben Gregory’s majestic, multi-faceted and emotionally wrenching debut solo album episode from a period of profound personal upheaval. In 2019 Blaenavon, the much-beloved band with whom he released two widely acclaimed albums, was dissolving. Not unrelatedly, Gregory was receiving treatment in psychiatric hospitals. “Everything on episode comes back to my struggle to interpret, or reinterpret, my life and its core relationships, after having my concept of reality revoked,” he says. “This may sound dramatic, but it’s hard to know if you can trust how you feel about a partner, a situation, a future, when you’ve sat in a hospital bed, torn a newspaper to shreds, sat back and watched it put itself back together.”

To associate episode purely with despair would be blinkered, however. Its title is a clear reference to the album’s “central theme” of mental health, but in the word’s implication of a contained and resolved period of time, “it manages to look forward,” Gregory says. The album’s lyrics are totally unflinching, at times almost unbearably raw, but as he explains “it gives those memories their outing without dwelling on them or letting them control you. I mean it’s just one episode, an essential one at that, but still just a part of a whole.” The record provides a framework, a box in which to place those experiences, to process them and seek to move forwards.

It’s notable that episode began to come together during Gregory’s recovery. For a long period after his time in hospital, he had been forced to stop writing music altogether, “partially because I found it too painful, but also because I wasn’t really functioning well enough to be creative,” but after a while was able to start reacquainting himself with his artistic drive, “working out how to get inspired again.” He applied to university on a whim (the fact that Blaenavon formed when he was just 14 had prevented him from doing so in the past), and in the process began to find a new sense of purpose. “I began to feel lucid again.”

Pre-order episode by Ben Gregory HERE