There’s a version of this record you’ve already heard, and it’s not the one I’m talking about.
You bought I Forget Where We Were in 2014 — maybe digitally, maybe the gatefold, maybe both — and you played it the way you play most things: in the background, while cooking, during a commute, during whatever life was doing to you that autumn. You heard the bigness of it. The drama. You filed it somewhere between “atmospheric” and “that Ben Howard album” and moved on.
Pull it out tonight. Something is waiting in there.
What the Production Actually Did
Ben Howard made his first record, Every Kingdom, on a relatively modest canvas — acoustic guitar, that voice, space. For this follow-up, recorded at RAK Studios in London and produced by his long-time collaborator Chris Bond, everything was scaled up in the most deliberate way possible. Bond and Howard weren’t chasing radio. They were chasing something closer to weather.
The band that coalesced around these sessions — Mickey Smith on drums, India Bourne on cello, Nat Wason on bass — plays with the kind of restraint that only lands when you’re actually listening for it. Smith in particular holds the kit back in ways that shouldn’t work at this tempo but do. His hi-hat on “Rivers in Your Mouth” is doing almost nothing, and it’s doing it perfectly.
There’s also something worth noting about the guitars: layered, treated, sometimes running together until they become texture rather than instrument. Howard and Bond made choices here that read as indulgent on a casual pass. On a real listen, they sound inevitable.
The Thing About the Vocal Takes
Howard’s voice on this record is not the voice from the Island Records acoustic sessions. There’s less politeness to it. The opening of the title track — that long, fractured exhale before the first line — sounds like a man deciding mid-breath whether to speak at all.
Engineers working on sessions like this talk about “committed takes” as opposed to technically correct ones. Whatever happened in the room at RAK, these sound committed.
“Conrad” is the song that most people passed over and shouldn’t have. At eight minutes, it asks for your full attention, and if you gave it half, you got half back. Listen tonight with the lights low and notice what the cello does in the final two minutes — not the melody, the space around the melody. India Bourne is filling a room that isn’t there until she plays it.
Why This Record Still Earns the Shelf Space
Here is my honest opinion: the second half of this album is significantly stronger than the first, and almost no one talks about it that way, because the opener “Small Things” makes a statement that’s hard to recover from. It’s a great song in the wrong position. It front-loads the emotional punch and leaves you expecting more of the same, when what Howard actually built was something that gets quieter, stranger, and more rewarding as it goes.
“End of the Affair” is the real closing statement of this record, not a denouement — a dissolution. It doesn’t resolve. It stops.
Tonight you know the melodies. You know the choruses. That means you’re finally free to hear the record underneath the record — the decisions about tone and tempo and restraint that Bond and Howard made in that studio when nobody was making them commercial. Put the phone in another room. Give it the forty-seven minutes it’s asking for.
You already paid for it.