Pye Corner Audio - More Songs About The Sun

A Solar Sequel That Refuses To Sit Still

Martin Jenkins has spent years cultivating a sound that feels like it was beamed in from some parallel universe where the BBC Radiophonic Workshop never closed down and everybody went on holiday to Ibiza instead of going home. Under the Pye Corner Audio name, he has built a discography that shifts between shadowy analogue dread and wide eyed cosmic warmth, sometimes within the same track. More Songs About The Sun, his second studio album for Sonic Cathedral, plants itself firmly in the warmth.

It is a sequel to 2022's Let's Emerge!, and anyone who spent time with that record will recognise the territory. The balearic textures, the shimmering guitar lines, the sense that Jenkins has found a way to make analogue synthesis sound like sunlight refracting through water. But where Let's Emerge! felt like a breakthrough, a declaration that there was more to Pye Corner Audio than haunted library music and paranoid soundscapes, More Songs About The Sun feels like a consolidation. Jenkins is not exploring the light so much as living in it.

The album opens with Euphoria, and it is a splendid statement of purpose. Arpeggiated electronics climb and climb, ascending to heights that make the title feel earned rather than ironic. Andy Bell, who collaborated on Let's Emerge!, returns here on four tracks, and his guitar work on Euphoria gives the track a six stringed spine that grounds the electronics in something warm and human. Bell's presence throughout the album is one of its great strengths. He brings a shoegaze sensibility that pairs naturally with Jenkins' synth textures, and the result sits somewhere between Ride at their most blissed out and Boards of Canada at their most direct.

Analogue Dreams is the next highlight, a track that has one foot in Jenkins' retrofuturistic instrumental catalog and the other on a rack of guitar pedals. It is the kind of song that makes you want to close your eyes and let it wash over you, which is perhaps the highest praise you can offer a track on an album called More Songs About The Sun. Cycle, another Bell collaboration, leans into the looping, blissed out sound of late eighties and early nineties rave and baggy, all forward momentum and hazy euphoria. It is bright, happy music that never sacrifices dynamics for mood. That is harder to pull off than it sounds.

Not everything works quite as well. My Shimmer drifts into a new age languor that feels a little too untethered to leave much of an impression. Eight Thousand Years, with its twinkling omnichord and unhurried groove, is pleasant but slight, a track that coasts where it could soar. These are not bad songs. They are just moments where the album's commitment to warmth tips into something a bit too comfortable.

But then there is The Breath of Now, and all of that comfort gets upended. Ian Rankin, the Scottish crime writer, contributes a spoken word piece about existential dread, and his monologue sits over a trip hop tinged backdrop that feels like it wandered in from a different record entirely. It is a shadowy, gripping outlier, a reminder that Jenkins has not forgotten how to do dark. The track should not work. A crime novelist narrating over balearic electronics is the kind of idea that sounds terrible on paper. But it works because Rankin's voice is perfectly cast, weathered and wry, and because the contrast throws the rest of the album into sharper relief. The sun feels brighter when you know the dark is still there.

The second half of the album is where it really hits its stride. Rays of Sunshine maintains the sci fi strangeness that runs through the best Pye Corner Audio work, achieving a kind of aloof serenity that suggests watching the sun from deep space rather than from a beach. The Race Is Run is electro dream pop that could be the missing link between Spiritualized, Suicide, and Boards of Canada, which is an absurd lineage to claim but the track earns it. As We Begin closes things out by gathering everything that came before into one final, spacious sweep.

More Songs About The Sun is not as startling as Let's Emerge! was, and it is not as flawlessly constructed as The Endless Echo. But it does not need to be. It is a record that knows what it wants to be and commits to it fully. Jenkins has said the underlying thread is optimism, a reminder that even in uncertain times there is always the promise of renewal. You can hear that in every bar. The album shines, and mostly it shines in the right direction.