Psych, Mod-pop, musique concrète… Weller pushes ever onwards.

“COSMIC SOUL? I’ll take that…” grins Paul Weller in riposte to MOJO’s two-word précis of his next, as yet untitled, album, due in June 2020. Braving lashing night-time rain and a drive through pitch-black country lanes, MOJO has been summoned to the Modfather’s Black Barn HQ in rural Surrey to enjoy a preview of his 15th solo studio adventure, recorded here over the past 18 months. As has become customary in Weller world, it is a radical departure from the album that preceded it; while 2018’s True Meanings was a woody, acoustic- guitar-led outing, this affair is a sonic salmagundi of trippy psychedelic funk and lopsided Cockney knees-ups; strange, atmospheric balladry, classic Weller Mod-pop and experimental electronica. Several tracks have been clearly designed to get your feet moving.

The most dramatic of the 10 songs MOJO hears is the opener, Mirror Ball, which was first previewed to the magazine back in spring 2018. Constructed from complementary segments, its choir-like opening surrenders to heavy drums and then what can only be described as “acid disco”. In between, there are flashes of musique concrète – tweeting birds, eerie piano – lifted from the experimental recordings Weller made for the “hauntological”

Ghost Box label (see news story in last month’s issue).

“The track’s about people going out for the night, going to clubs, that sort of idea,” Paul explains of the spellbinding opus. Astonishingly, the song was originally destined for a B-side during the True Meanings campaign, but was held over for this album on the advice of MOJO writer David Cavanagh, who wrote 2018’s MOJO Weller cover story and sadly died at Christmas last year.

As with True Meanings, Irish composer Hannah Peel scores most (though not all) of the album’s strings, used boldly on both the psychedelic soul workouts and the more mellow singer-songwriter tracks, the latter including the beautiful, wistful On Sunset. Longtime Weller collaborator Stan Kybert has again helped out with the record, while there are also several surprise guest vocalists and musicians, though MOJO isn’t yet at liberty to reveal them – except to say that this time last year Weller asked this writer for a contact for Slade guitarist Jim Lea, who here adds violin redolent of his group’s Number 1 from 1971, Coz I Love You.

“It’s taking the music somewhere new again,” Weller concludes of his newie. “You can dance to it, but there’s also stuff that will challenge you. Lots of good songs and melodies, really.”

“It’s taking the music somewhere new again.” PAUL WELLER