8. Prefab SproutSteve McQueen

This album always takes me back to England, and to a very specific feeling of youth. I first discovered Steve McQueen when I was probably 13, riding my bike through parks and the more rural parts of Essex, like Epping Forest. Even though the band is from outside Newcastle, their music has this way of capturing a sense of space and place, a mix of freedom and quiet restriction that really resonated with me at that age.

It’s not just the songwriting or production that drew me in, it’s the feeling of it. Prefab Sprout’s songs have this ability to evoke being young, moving through the landscape around you, caught somewhere between possibility and limitation. That tension, that sense of wanting to break out while still rooted in the familiar, is something that has stayed with me and influenced the way I think about song construction and emotional texture in my own work.