Lewis Watson’s new album ‘blue skies grey’ out today

Today, acclaimed UK musician Lewis Watson has released his new album blue skies grey through Nettwerk. Listen in full here and below.

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.

Watch the visualiser video for the up-tempo, pick-me-up track “bolt from the blue”, taken from the album. Watson compares the intensity of his love to a lightning strike, propelled by “a million volts” over a gale of infectious 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,” he explains.

Intimate and raw, each of Lewis Watson’s albums is a study of human connection, disconnection, and the crossed wires that booby-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 soaring “bolt from the blue”. 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 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 2025 with a bruising collection of folk-pop that unfolds like a travelogue of his journey through life’s twists and turns.