We first wrote about Harley Alexander back in 2015 when he released his album Gold Shirt under the name Harley Alexander and the Universal Lovers. The record was a summer special, languid and warm and half-paced. Indeed, we summed it up as “the musical equivalent of a holiday sunset where you can do little more than sip drinks, suppress yawns and look at your surroundings with a silly grin… music [for] those small, glorious moments when Real Life backs off to allow an elated contentedness to settle”.
Alexander is back with Harland, a new eight-track album to be released this week on Sports Day Records. The record, at least partly inspired by trans-Canadian travels which included stops at an isolated Quebecois cabin and tree planting near Vancouver, is a mellow, earthy brand of pop music which expands upon his first release. Packing together the excitement and anxiety and loneliness of new beginnings, he manages to create smooth music without compromising on depth, the sharp edges removed but not forgotten. 
Serving as a great introduction to the album, single ‘Staring at Photographs’ is a track that’s “both weary of and attracted to nostalgia”, balancing the comfortable respite memories can bring but all the while aware that time is linear and we’ve got to keep on moving forwards. While this may suggest an anxious itch, the song is in fact a laid-back jam. Rather than hanging around to become troublesome, you get the sense that the emotions here are flowing evenly and constantly away from their source, a gentle eddy that might never stop but looks serene and pretty under the right light.
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Harland is set for release on the 22nd of July via the good folks at Sports Day Records. You can pre-order via the Harley Alexander Bandcamp page. Harley Alexander is heading out on his first US dates this summer too, so have a gander below to see if he’s stopping near you:
Art by Selina Latour