JOHN GRANT IS the voice of a generation. That was the title bestowed upon the American-nowbased-in-Iceland artist by a Britishmagazine last year after the release of his third solo album. Grey Tickles, Black Pressures, which swerves cannily between dark electro melancholy and a twisted, almost sinister indie rock, shifts John’s game to a whole new level. He’s become a chart artist whose albums hit the top 10 around the world, has collaborated with the likes of Goldfrapp, Sinead O’Connor and Elton John and earned a prestigious Best International Male Solo Artist nomination at the 2014 Brit Awards.
It was 2013’s Pale Green Ghosts that saw John win accolades, glowing critical acclaim and, finally, a mainstream audience. Pale Green Ghosts was also the album where he came out as HIV-positive, still a big step in an era when Andy Bell, Holly Johnson and Charlie Sheen are among the only visible positive celebrities. It became a major talking point for John who, in interviews, discussed his state of mind both before and after his diagnosis.
It’s a salient topic that John returns to on his new album. He also returned to America to record this album, leaving his beloved home base of Reykjavík. Grey Tickles, Black Pressure (“Grey Tickles” meaning mid-life crisis in Icelandic and “Black Pressure” is translated from Turkish for nightmare) starts and ends with dramatic spoken word snippets. Simply called Intro and Outro, they are excerpts from the same Biblical quote (1 Corinthians 13) regarding the divinity of love, which a young John was taught in church. In between are 12 songs that attempt and often succeed in documenting the reality of love today, corrupted by “pain, misunderstandings, jealousy, objectification and expectations,” as John rather succinctly puts it.