Writing a Guitar Solo Is Like Writing Another Song

Joe Newman has led alt-J to worldwide success, but has always focused on songwriting first-guitar playing second. Until now...

- By Ellie Rogers. Photographs by George Muncey and Rosie Matheson

The genre-defying alt-Jhave kept listeners waiting for a new album for a little over four and a half years. Now, almost a decade since the release of their Mercury Prize-winning debut, An Awesome Wave, the trio - guitarist/ vocalist Joe Newman, keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton and drummer Thom Sonny Green - are back with their fourth album, The Dream. It's a record that effervesces with a rejuvenated sense of experimentalism and self-confidence, underpinned by elegantly macabre themes, serpentine guitar, and infectious hooks.

After a planned hiatus in 2019 became prolonged by the Covid-19 pandemic, Joe spent the last couple of years directing his energy towards rekindling his love for the guitar, reflecting upon his musical past and, of course, penning the 12 new tracks that would come to make up The Dream.

A self-confessed cinephile, Joe describes the new record in visual, rather than musical terms, likening it to a jagged landscape with great views. He explains: “I think each of our songs is separate stories, so I see them as kind of short films, and overall, there's a greater landscape of melancholic music that explores love and loss and the darker sides of the human condition.

The album does indeed come with its fair share of underlying darkness, with themes ranging from murder and revenge, to love, loss, and even getting rich quickly with cryptocurrencies. I'm always searching for vignettes, Joe says, and then you combine those vignettes and before long you have twenty seconds of something and it's really exciting.”