At the start of this year, George Ezra gave an interview to the Observer. It was filled with talk of “drawing a line in the sand”, the possibility of giving up touring and his willingness to put limitations on his success. He was resolute that he didn’t want to break the US – it “would kill me” – and staunch in his belief that a vastly successful pop career was incompatible with parenthood.
This was not, perhaps, the kind of talk one might expect from Ezra. His two multi-platinum albums to date have been thanks to his relentless positivity. Almost uniquely among the ranks of male singer-songwriters with voices a furniture salesman would describe as “artfully distressed”, Ezra’s hits dealt not in angst, but carefree cheeriness. Whether the lyrics specifically mentioned the sun, bikinis or the yellow and green of sand framed by palm trees, singles such as Paradise and Shotgun always carried a distinct whiff of SPF 50 and the sun lounger selfie.
Whenever something darker appeared – “what a terrible time to be alive if you’re prone to overthinking” – it was quickly swept away by the lyrical equivalent of an affectionate shoulder-punch: “Hey, pretty smiling people / We’re alright together”. It’s an approach that stood Ezra in good stead during lockdown, when the public seemed to decide that there was a plentiful supply of self-examination and angst in daily life without listening to more of it. You didn’t hear much of Rag’n’Bone Man’s racked Human, but there was George Ezra, soundtracking Joe Wicks’ daily exhortations to stay fit and donating his royalties to the NHS: “Pulls the best out of you, dunnit?” panted Wicks appreciatively as Shotgun boomed around his makeshift exercise studio.
Understandably, the follow-up to 2018’s Staying at Tamara’s is front-loaded with more of the same. It would be unfair to call the upbeat tracks formulaic – Ezra’s guitar, the key sound in most of his big smashes, is far less apparent; he seems to have dialled down the vocal affectations that mangled his breakthrough hit Budapest into incomprehensibility, an alteration that occasionally leaves him sounding a little like Richard Thompson – but there’s a distinct sense of business as usual. Brass parps and pianos hammer happily. Choruses come augmented with massed backing vocals, as though a large audience is already bellowing along. There are references to foreign travel. Problems, both personal and general, are also mentioned – the title track recounts a visit to a doctor who “cut open my head and took a look inside”; Manila references lockdown and cancelled flights – then batted away in favour of dancing “till my shoes fall apart” or spending nights “tumbling through heaven”. Green Green Grass sees death as an excuse for a riotous wake.
Relentless positivity is tough to pull off without jangling people’s nerves, something the singles from Staying at Tamara’s managed with aplomb. The melodies were hugely commercial without sounding desperately eager to please, and if the sunny mood was contrived, it didn’t show. This time, it isn’t quite as straightforward. The jollity occasionally feels a bit forced – when Ezra sings the words “throw a party”, it’s augmented by whoops and cheers – while the tunes teeter on the line that separates enviably hook-laden from ingratiatingly cheesy: the chorus of Green Green Grass is both impossible to dislodge from your brain and worryingly easy to imagine being sung by the Vengaboys or Boney M. So is Dance All Over Me’s flimsy excursion into pop house. You wonder if people will notice or if they’re just after something breezy to play at barbecues.
Gold Rush Kid gets better the further it moves away from the standard blueprint, into emotional territory that, if it isn’t exactly dark (happily for him, Ezra seems to inhabit a world where every problem comes with a resolution) is certainly more overcast. Love Somebody Else – “because I’m giving up on myself” – is stately and cinematic, while closer Sun Went Down is great, a mesh of guitar harmonics overlaid with sparse lyrics. Its sense of space and beatific mood (“I’m so happy I could die now”) feels noticeably different from Ezra’s usual brand of optimism: it’s curiously psychedelic, not an adjective anyone would apply to the rest of his oeuvre. The best thing here is I Went Hunting, on which pillowy electronics and acoustic guitar host an unsentimental but moving exploration of Ezra’s struggle with OCD: “Imagine having a thought then thinking it again,” he sings, then repeats the phrase “thinking it again” over and over, like a stuck record.
You hesitate to imply Ezra’s heart seems more in this stuff than the songs destined to become singles: he’s made it clear he sees himself as a pop-facing people-pleaser, and there’s every chance the most pop-facing stuff here will please people accordingly, relative dip in quality or not. But Gold Rush Kid does imply there might be more to George Ezra than the lucrative sunny facade: it would be a shame if he drew a line in the sand before exploring that hinterland more thoroughly.
Gold Rush Kid is released on 10 June.
This week Alexis listened to
Sky Ferreira: Don’t Forget
Nine years on from her fantastic debut album, Sky Ferreira returns with an equally fantastic single: a thrilling pop song, streaked with noise, underpinned by ferocious synths.