This Saturday, June 21, Zygmunt Day will self-release his new album, On Streets That Know. It’s the debut full-length from the singer-songwriter and finds him expanding his sound from his last release, 2011’s lo-fi A Ghost, and returning to the full-band arrangements of his first two EPs, Scratchcard Winner and This City Has An Echo, with a new collective, Echo Pressure. Recorded and produced over the last two years, it sees Day and his core four-pierce joined by a cast of string, brass and woodwind players, as well as featuring backing vocals from fellow singer-songwriter Sophie Jamieson and brother Will Day. Ahead of the release, Day’s streaming the album in full on his SoundCloud – have a listen above.
Lyrically, it’s rooted in the titular, overcast streets of East London, those over which the "skies are falling in" on ‘Hailstones’, where Day takes on the Springsteen-like role of bandleader, fronting up a brass-gilded crescendo which gives way to a version of ‘Dirty Old Town’, Ewan MacColl’s standard that Day says "was the starting point for the album, beginning an exploration of the relationships between place, imagination, work and relationships that underpin the songs". While there’s a close-focus specificity to the frozen corners and canal paths of the songs’ settings, pointed up on the spoken word closer, ‘Prisoner (Reprise)’, sonically the album moves further afield, from the hazed, fingerpicked acoustic framework of ‘Kitchen Floor’ to the urgent, melodic indie of ‘Changing Grace’, by way of ‘Wanderers’, where tropicalia-touched guitars tumble down over dancehall rhythms before working through to an ace, extended disco outro. Says Day of the record: "This album is a letter from England in the first few years of this decade; hoping, broken, evasive, and wry."
He’ll be launching the record on Friday, June 20, playing The Victoria in Dalston with support from Columbia, where there’ll also be advance copies for sale – head to the Facebook event for full details and go to Day’s Bandcamp to get hold of the album on release.
