Lewis Watson shares new single “feelings fade” today, announces new album ‘blue skies grey’ (out 7th February)

Acclaimed UK musician Lewis Watson has today announced his new album blue skies grey, out on 7th February 2025 through Nettwerk (pre-order here).

Lewis Watson has a gift for drawing you into his orbit. Early in his career, the folk-pop singer-songwriter built a buzz around his YouTube covers and stage-diving antics while showing us how emotionally resonant music can be when it’s peeled back to its purest core. On blue skies grey, his fourth studio album, Watson has matured and evolved but his game plan remains the same – to turn fleeting feelings into universal reflections.

Accompanying the album announcement is his newest single “feelings fade”, out today (listen here and below). The track showcases Watson’s relatable lyricism as electronic drums and software horns guide the listener towards “a foggy London town”, while mellotron adds a surprising proggy twist to a break-up missive tied up in that moment “when you’ve broken up said everything that needs to be said,” he explained. “It’s not so much searching for closure but help with getting that first step into being comfortable with it, by trying to find that cause. Was it me, was it you, was it something else?”

Lewis Watson – Feelings Fade (Official Music Visualiser)

Intimate and raw, each of Lewis Watson’s albums is a study of human connection, disconnection, and the crossed wires that boobie-trap our hearts. To put it simply, blue skies grey is a collection of songs that capture how romance feels. “It felt like I was pressing play on a voice recording of a therapy session,” Watson shares of the writing process. “To have loved and lost is probably something that almost everybody has felt, and I do think that music is a great language for exploring that,” he further adds.

blue skies grey can be heartbreaking and devastating, lurching from the tear-streaked balladry of “wasted heart” to the skywards pick-me-up of “bolt from the blue” in one fell swoop. On the latter track, Watson compares the intensity of his love to a lightning strike, propelled by “a million volts” over a gale of fist-pumping indie-rock. “It’s written about being pulled from a dark place by somebody in a movie-like-love-at-first-sight kind of situation”.

A previous single “raining in LA” strikes a different mood. Here, a stormy acoustic strum patter matches the deluge of downcast emotion that’s followed him across the Atlantic. The song was written during a 2017 trip to LA while the weather was “pissing it down” and he was wrestling with a bad breakup. “I’m trying to escape something like a locational emotion, but it’s not attached to that location, it’s attached to me, and I’ve brought it with me, and now everybody’s dealing with my sadness,” he clarifies.

Tumbling into a folksy autumnal ballad, “september” showcasing Watson’s flair for pithy poetic flourishes, rooted in a lifelong “obsession” with language (he used to write poetry as a child). “Being able to play with language, having words mean different things and rhyming words, it became a game for me,” he muses. Cue punny or alliterative one-liners like “When autumn leaves”, “You fall for me / Then disappear by winter” or “so help my healing with a hand to hold”, the last lyric being lifted from “silence”, where gently meandering slowcore mirrors the track’s sombre lyrical content.

blue skies grey out on 7th February, 2025 – pre-order

About Lewis Watson:

blue skies grey is the latest chapter for the Preston-born, Bicester-raised singer-songwriter whose trademark style of rousing vocals and acoustic songcraft has generated two UK-charting albums (2014’s debut The Morning and 2017’s Midnight) and seen him collaborate with artists including Gabrielle Aplin, dodie, and Everything Everything. This new LP follows 2020’s full-length the love that you want, on which Watson introduced electronic elements as well as serving as a co-producer alongside Richard Wilkinson. In 2024, he released a new version of The Morning, titled The Morning After, which was entirely self-produced, following his recent self-taught excursions into production. Watson is keen to spend more time at the production controls in future, but for now, he’s leaping into the new year with a bruising collection of folk-pop that unfolds like a travelogue of his journey through life’s twists and turns.