Olly Alexander has shared a second teaser from his forthcoming new album, the title track “Polari.” This bracing, punch in the gut album opener comes alongside another dynamic video from director Colin Solal Cardo (Charli XCX, Robyn) and you can watch it below.
Speaking about the title track, Olly reveals, “This is track 1 on the album and is intended as a shot of adrenaline and jumpstart the car kind of introduction because I’m about to take you for a ride – it’s also a bit of an audio collage of all the music that follows so I’m very excited to put this out!”
“Polari” follows the album launch single “Cupid’s Bow” which Queerty praised for its “pulsating electro pop beats,” and “80s club nostalgia with a modern edge,” proclaiming “Olly Alexander is back, and he’s wielding his ‘Cupid’s Bow’ with precision,” while Out Magazine called out the track’s “killer chorus.” The track was released last month and introduced Olly’s new era as a fully-fledged solo artist.
Across the new album he explores themes of desire, intimacy, voyeurism and fate all wrapped up in a pounding club soundscape which title track “Polari” has in spades. The record was crafted alongside writer and producer Danny L Harle and is a pop album for the ages. Olly Alexander’s first album under his own name takes as its primary inspiration the (almost) lost art of Polari.
Originating around Europe and the Romani community as early as the 1600s, this coded slang became in effect a secret language for homosexuals and the stigmatized during the twentieth century. It’s a concept Olly first came across when coming out, and resonated more deeply with when playing Richie in It’s A Sin, where he grappled with questions about identity, self-expression and community. The kinds of which have always populated British life, and have long been threaded through the history of pop music – you just had to know where to look.
“In the ‘lost gay language’ of Polari, “Polari” means ‘to speak’,” Olly explains. “I was very inspired by how we communicate with each other and what it means to speak a secret language, something I think we all do in some form or another with the people we’re close to. In our hyper connected world of fractured communication, it’s not easy to trust that anything is what it seems, I felt that a song about vernacular should be as wild and unpredictable as the history of Polari itself. I had such a great time making this bijou song with Danny and taking musical inspiration from the past, the present and the distant future. Please enjoy and thank you for listening!”
After a decade releasing music as Years & Years, Polari is literally Olly Alexander talking the talk. He bonded with Danny L Harle over a mutual love of 80s club music, that period of uncompromising, avant-garde pop which nonetheless snuck into the mainstream. Polari remained a north star throughout the creative process, a language likewise lacking widespread recognition but still influential in plain sight (see such colloquialisms as “drag”, “naff” and “trade”).
The album arrives alongside audio-visual world-building in which Olly is in complete control, from its anarchic Derek Jarman-inspired aesthetic to Olly even writing a short play accompanying its release, full of cowboys, gods, and the occasional music industry exec. And after a long history of secrets and subtext, Polari is ultimately an open and universal pop record about those needs that transcend time, sexuality, and self: what it means to belong, to be loved, and (Polari literally translates as “to talk”) to connect.