Grace After a Party, the debut album by Bristol‘s Jemima Coulter, was conceived during a doomed romantic gesture which resulted in them wandering the streets of Marseille alone with nothing but the audiobook of Henry Miller’s The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder for company. It was a time of both great disappointment and dawning realisations, and ultimately led to Coulter returning home and deciding to stop the seemingly futile quest for happiness in other people.
Perhaps because of its uneasy gestation, the album is a difficult one to categorise. Encompassing both the surreal magic of dreams and the sobering pain of reality, it sees Coulter embody both themselves and other, imagined characters. Musically speaking it’s elusive too. Raised on a diet of mainly classical music, Coulter grew up outside of ingrained ideas of popular music. This in turn brings a freedom and freshness, the ability to make something that sounds truly unique. “I’ve never thought about how anything’s supposed to sound,” they say. “I don’t have a reference point apart from what I think sounds good. I just want to make music that’s different every time you listen to it.”
Miller’s fable-like story, which centres on a clown who grows tired of eliciting simple laughter in his audience and longs to bring them true joy, extends its influence across the record. Nowhere is this more clear than on lead single ‘SST’, a song which follows a character who, in a moment of feverish spontaneity, decides to leave their life behind and join the circus. “I wanted to capture the feeling of someone wandering unburdened by the expectations of traditional society and escaping to another kind of life,” Coulter describes, “and yet also only doing that because they’re out of their mind […] pointing out how unsafe that is in this financially-orientated world that doesn’t give a fuck about your dreams.”
Grace After a Party will be released on 29th July via Hand in Hive. Pre-order it now from the Jemima Coulter Bandcamp page.
