Orlando Weeks: World In Motion

Last time we spoke with Orlando Weeks, we told him we thought his music sounded like winter. Not cold or harsh, but a certain draught in its atmospherics, the same sense of crisp outdoors that was woven through the last of his work as frontman of The Maccabees, and all of the artistic projects he's been up to since. Polite and patient as ever, he was kind enough not to refute our suggestion, but marked it as interesting - interesting as in, "I'd be interested to know if you change your mind."

Turns out, he was exactly right. On record, 'A Quickening' is much warmer than his introductory run of live shows might have suggested. If anything, it's closer to spring in its theme - the celebration of new life in the form of the birth of his first child, and a brave new leap into sharing a little more of himself with the world.

"I definitely didn't sit down and decide I was going to make a record about this," he ponders, revisiting his headspace of early 2018. "I was just writing songs in the way that I'm always writing and making visual work, and they all ended up coming back to the experiences that we were having waiting for our baby to arrive. I think it's called Baader-Meinhof theory, where because you've started thinking about something, you hear it everywhere else, seeing it in other parts of culture or the news…

In many ways, he needn't worry, for it's an album that speaks pretty well for itself. Making great use of Weeks' knack for lyrical nostalgia, it tells a captivating story of the anxieties and excitement of early parenthood, the thrill of waiting to meet your new child wrestling with the concerns of doing a decent job as a parent. Having spent the past few years living in Berlin, Lisbon and Margate before returning back to his native London, it's indebted in part to sounds of the sea, a new look on old horizons. Most of all, it's a story of true First Love, an experience unlike any Weeks has felt before.