FALLING BACKWARDS | VINYL RECORD (LP)

Him & Earl, Falling Backwards' is the debut album from Him & Earl via Wah Wah 45s, serving up a mystic brew of desert blues, English folk, Americana, and stirring southern soul, with tentacles stretching out into psychedelia and prog, across 11 hot and hazy tracks. Singer-songwriter Olly Him and DJ, producer, and composer Wyndham Earl both have deeply-dug roots in the south coast of England; with the former making his name as a solo artist before exploring his soulful folk/prog sound with a number of live acts, and the latter collaborating on albums and sharing stages with Bonobo, Khruangbin, Alice Russell, and TM Juke, having remixes released by Tru Thoughts and Mr Bongo Records, and releasing his solo projects on his Time Spun imprint. The pair first met in 2015 when Wyndham produced some songs for now defunct hypnotic Afro-folk outfit Creatures Of The Deep, of which Olly was a founder member. They instantly clicked, but after the group broke up it was a few years before serendipity brought them back together; a chance encounter at a gig saw them begin hatching plans to make a full album under the name Him & Earl with Olly writing the songs and Wyndham arranging and producing the project. After so long floating in the creative ether, the connective power of these songs has been strikingly immediate. The debut Him & Earl live show in early 2026, before any tracks had even come out, blew Olly and Wyndham's expectations out of the water as their five-piece band found themselves toe-to-toe with a sellout crowd - a sweaty room full of happy music fans, on an otherwise bleak January night, throwing shapes to live percussion showdowns, losing themselves in psychedelic guitar and bass wig-outs, and singing along to choruses they'd never heard a note of before. Since then, the first two singles 'Bottled Up' and 'Away' have had high profile airplay from the likes of BBC 6 Music's Huw Stephens and Cerys Matthews, and Radio X's John Kennedy, adding to widespread tastemaker and specialist support around the world, as excitement builds for the album. The LP's introspective and philosophical lyrics are brought to life by a sonorous yet strangely uplifting sound palette that morphs by stealth into a darkly propulsive, psychedelic and bluesy trip. Opening song 'Away' taps straight into a key theme of the record - journeying, in both a physical and mental sense, and the quest to move on and embrace the unknown - and it's sunny guitars, trumpet and violin barely even hint at the tumultuous sonic adventure that's set to unfold. A stronger indication comes in the title track,'Falling Backwards', as it's elegant web of staccato finger-picked hook, fluid piano melodies and strings unfurls into a six-minute exploration of what Olly describes as 'going through every day normality while feeling close to chaos and like things could fall apart at any moment when there is a myriad of different things holding everything together and if one thing goes wrong everything can fall apart around it.