JW Francis & Paul Cherry

Genre – Pop

JW FRANCIS

Born in Oklahoma, raised in Paris, living in New York City, assistant to a Nobel Prize Winner, licensed New York City tour guide and Murder Mystery business owner, JW Francis is one of the newest signings to Sunday Best Recordings. His brand of lo-fi, utterly irresistible bedroom dream-pop takes its lead from the city JW lives in, with echoes of Jonathan Richman, The Velvet Underground and the lo-fi sound New York has been inspiring for decades.

Following a string of singles, New York’s very own JW Francis finally releases his sophomore album WANDERKID on Sunday Best Recordings. The LP is the follow up to his critically acclaimed debut We Share a Similar Joy, which saw JW firmly mark himself out as New York’s next lo-fi legend gaining mass support from BBC 6Music, Apple Music, Spotify, DIY, The Line of Best Fit, The Independent, HMV, Wonderland, and many others.

A collection of 11 irresistible tracks, WANDERKID is a concept album which explores themes of escapism and the urge to break free as JW elaborates; “WANDERKID is an album about escape. It’s supposed to be a gut punch of a record about an anti-hero named WANDERKID who wants to get OUT: out of his living situation, out of his head, out of his life. This album is like looking out the car window with an urgent desire to be on the other side. It was finished during the most recent global pandemic, so hopefully folks find it relatable.”

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PAUL CHERRY

Through pining comes purpose. Paul Cherewick, monikered Paul Cherry, makes a departure from pining for an unrequited love on his debut LP Flavour toward the hunger for creative fulfillment on Back on the Music. “Bouncing off the bottom: this pattern is the problem…” is the melancholic opening line of the new album, a meandering meditation on the life of an artist: chasing inspiration, finding community, and the struggle to maintain both. Throughout the buoyant, alright-on-the-outside tracks that make up his second album, Cherry staggers and stumbles back into love with his life and craft.

Music becomes personified inside Tootsie Roll, becoming an ugly, grinning trench coated villain plucked right out of a vintage Max Fleischer cartoon, cooing to the listener, “You know you want me. Take me, take me,” harmonizing over his own voice. Almost as if through excess, inhibition and precise self-analysis, Paul Cherry may find quiet. In the luxuriant arrangement of the title track, Back on the Music he sings, “You love to play, but it don’t pay. Feels like you’re caught in check mate.” Not everything fits neatly within the lines of these songs, as in the lonely, wobbling flute melody that carries us out of It Happens All the Time. Cherry shows us that often the path back to one’s self—disguised in this album as Music—is a wavering one.

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