Over the course of two wildly varied and acclaimed EPs, 2019’s England and 2021’s The Valley released via untitled (recs), shape-shifting London outfit Famous has forged its own inimitable sound. A sound that subverts pop’s Gospels. A barrage of halcyon melodies, despondent electronics jutting against warming acoustics, and scintillating song structure, all this the singular creative vision of Jack Merrett — Famous’ singer, lyricist, core songwriter and only consistent member — that finds convulsively spectacular expression in their 2024 debut album, Party Album.

Coming to prominence as a part of the celebrated South-London Brixton Windmill scene alongside Black Country, New Road and Black Midi, the group quickly drew recognition for its boundary-pushing, post- post-punk sound. Jack Saunders of BBC Radio One crowned Famous “the most original band in the UK right now”, The Line of Best Fit called them “almost unforgivably ambitious”, and Antony Fantano called them “dope”. Dork gave The Valley a resounding 5-star review, declaring it “as singularly independent and entirely of its own world as anything else you’ll listen to”.

Famous’s debut LP Party Album is the record Famous has been threatening to make for eight years – an album that Merrett intimates is a lot like Famous itself, “a long coming-of-age drama that always threatens to end but goes on forever”. Recorded primarily in The Kink’s old studio Konk in Crouch End, North London, Party Album’s nine tracks are cohesive in the way the pieces of a broken heart are, woven together by Merrett’s mercurial vocal delivery and striking lyrics that find epiphanies within crises and crises within those epiphanies. For Merrett, he tersely suggests, it is simply an album of nine love songs.