Yorkshire born, south London based TONE says on the title track “I was in a writing session with my friend and collaborator Jeremy Jay after my daughter had just been born. I had already written all of this music with really emotional chords so we just turned the mic on and I freestyled the lyrics with her in mind. I think with everything going at the moment with lockdowns and restrictions it also reflects a current feeling of wanting to see loved ones and not being able to. You feel like you’d do anything to see them.”

With a mixtape already under his belt, one that he says was thrown together on a whim; this new body of work was created during the pregnancy and subsequent birth of his daughter. TONE, real name Basil Anthony Harewood, was compelled to capture this significant moment, recording mostly at night, with his new life and old life in mind. The album is less a departure of who he was but an embrace of the future and the new life that arrives with beginning a family.

Across the 11 tracks, we hear tender guitar riffs and off-beat R&B elements press up against influences of dub and shoegaze leaving you with a woozy afterglow. TONE’s distinctive vocals are complemented by the familiar voices of Coby Sey on “So I Can See You”, Fran Lobo on “From the North” and Roxanne Tataei on “Make It Drop”.

Having both Afro-Caribbean and Welsh heritage has informed the ways in which he sees things and the music he has been magnetized to, especially growing up in both a tiny village in the north of England in East Yorkshire as well as further afield in Europe. Time spent in St Kitts and Nevis as a child opened his eyes and ears to calypso, reggae and dub and while back home in the UK, he fell in love with ska, punk and skinhead culture none of which he ever outgrew and to this day still informs his music practice.

As a film graduate, there is, of course, an expansive list of films that also influenced his music writing but for this album in particular TONE cites documentaries on Tokyo Ga, the Notebook on Cities and Clothes documentary by Wim Wender and the black and white film Rumble Fish by Francis Ford Coppolla as a guiding force.

Each track was recorded on a Tascam 38 tape machine in the studio he set up with Mica Levi and Coby Sey in Hither Green with the drums, played by Marc Pell (Good Bad Happy Sad) were recorded at Andy Ramsey’s studio (Stereolab). Alongside, Levi and Sey TONE is a CURL collective member and was half of the short-lived punk-duo, Farai.