After long and exhausting days of COVID-19 lockdown on his Swedish farm, Kristian Matsson dusted off his guitar, gathered his most devoted musician friends and returned to music with a new album, full of creative energy, inspiration and misty-imaginative lyrics.

The Tallest Man On Earth has always distanced his music from anyone else’s hands and worked every bit of every song on his own. Maybe it is because no one could just reach his guitar, but Kristian himself said that this came out due to the lack of precise orientation in his work at the first career stages. However, on Henry St. – on his first album, recorded with a little help from his friends, formed in a complete band, Kristian decides to take this step, and as a result, this small step for a big man has become a big step forward in the entire discography.

While 2019’s previous studio album, “I Love You. It’s A Fever Dream” was a bitter and more straightforward ballad folk with intimate lyrics, slowed tempos, guitar, voice and a deaf metronome as a foot-tapping rhythm, Henry St. unfolds before the listener huge landscapes full of nature, sights, self-confidence obtained in hard battles with oneself and thoughts of nostalgia and caring. The whole band, highly elevated by this stream of inspiration after a long stagnation, rushes to the beautiful horizon as strong stallions across the field. Like Big Thief on their recent and monumental Dragon New Warm Mountain, all musicians concentrate all power of their instruments into a great kaleidoscope of rhythms, tempos and moods. Even the melancholy finds its place on Henry St. – for example, the title track, an all-piano ballad that feels like been played for four and a half minutes by the free hand of impressionist classical composers.

But the most interesting moment is how the lyrics have undergone the greatest changes in the style of Kristian. If earlier they were moderately metaphorical, but still understandable, themed with feelings and people, then on Henry St. they can confuse and unsettle with their multi-layeredness and a huge number of images that you need to connect with each other in time during the song playing. At first glance, they seem to be written by the author in a language understandable only to himself, but later, with time and immersion in the macro world of Henry St., they gently begin to reveal themselves, forming an aesthetic that can be captured and felt only here. Henry St. is the release of the creative genius of each member of the record, who for a long time, but courageously endured its time and infused in the minds of the musicians like wine, eventually opening up new opportunities for The Tallest Man On Earth to develop the project further and write new chapters of its brave history.

Order Henry St. by The Tallest Man On Earth HERE