Katy J Pearson

May the wind be always at your back chants Katy J Pearson over the opening seconds of her third solo record. Though lifted from the age-old Celtic Blessing, it is also disjoined, glitchy; transformed into a murky, modern good-luck charm for an electronic advent. Indicative of a shift in heart and sound, it fires the starting pistol for an album on which Pearson refuses to kick her heels; running red lights, resisting retrogrades, and exercising her own autonomy — in life, in love, and in the recording studio.

Following 2020’s Return and 2022’s Sound of the Morning and a more recent period of burnout, self-enforced exile from music-making, and solo travel, Katy came back to her practice with clarity of mind and vision. “I knew exactly who I wanted to work with, I knew exactly who my session band were going to be, I knew where I wanted to record. It felt like I was finally calling the shots for myself, and that was so empowering”, she reflects. Having shied away from pop music since the souring of an early-career relationship with a major label (“it made me terrified of pop”).

Someday, Now features ten glistening tracks which are pop by nature, rather than design or demand.

“I’ve found my way back to myself”, she summarises. It is a move both metaphorical and literal: producer Bullion did not push Pearson to sing at the very top of her impressive vocal range and helped her train herself out of an accidental American twang — instead making room for her to sing in her natural accent, cut soft by sandy Gloucestershire limestone.

Katy J Pearson’s third record, she asserts, “is my best work so far, and I’m not afraid to say that.” As she puts it on album closer ‘Sky’, Not on my knees / Look how I go / I’m an eagle / I am the sky. That yearned-for, dreamed-of someday is, it seems, happening right now