John Grant began thinking about The Art of The Lie in the Autumn of 2022. Earlier that year, John had been introduced to Ivor Guest, producer and composer at Grace Jones’ Southbank show, the finale of her Meltdown Festival. They began talking about two records Guest had worked on, ‘Hurricane’ for Jones, ‘Prohibition’ for Brigitte Fontaine. “Grace and Brigitte are two very big artists for me,” says Grant. “I love the albums he did for them. ‘Hurricane’ is an indispensable piece of Grace’s catalogue.” An idea was sparked. “I said, I really think you should do this next record with me. He said, I think you’re right.”

A year and a half later, the result is John Grant’s most opulent, cinematic, luxurious album yet: The Art of The Lie. As the title suggests, the lyrical ingenuity counterweighted under all this considered musical largesse is as dark as its production is epic and bold. Ivor Guest and his

cast-list of storied musicians have brought the drama, flecks of intrigue as beguiling as Laurie Anderson or The Art of Noise. John Grant has earthed it in deeply felt humanity and pitch-black realism. “The clothing that it’s dressed up in makes it more palatable,” he says. “It helps the bitter pill go down. Music and humour are how I’ve always dealt with the dark side of life. Come to think of it, it’s how I deal with the good side too.”

Grant likens the musical flavours of The Art of the Lie to the sumptuous Vangelis soundtrack for Bladerunner or the Carpenters if John Carpenter were also a member. “The first time I saw that movie, that opening scene, and heard that music, I was astounded we were being introduced to the evil empire of the future combined with the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard.” While undeniably a John Grant record, nestling humour into tragedy, bleeding anger into compassion, there is a musical ambition and nerve to ‘The Art of the Lie’ which offsets its most political and personal moments.

The hard juxtaposition of beauty and cruelty makes for compelling listening on Grant’s sixth album, a record that ties childhood trauma to hardened adult after-effects, twinning both to the political malaise of America 2024, a country being drawn to the precipice of its own destruction. “We were allowed to feel like we belonged for a couple of seconds,” says Grant. “Not anymore.”

‘The Art of the Lie’ is a considered title, taken from the song Meek AF, itself a lyrical inversion of the biblical edict that the meek shall inherit the earth. Against a lubricated groove, some

Zapp-esque talk box and a spidery keyboard figure, Grant sets out his understanding of the new ethics of America. “Trump’s book, ‘The Art of the Deal’, is now seen by MAGA disciples as just another book of the Bible and Trump himself as a messiah sent from heaven. Because, God wants you to be rich.”

“This album is in part about the lies people espouse and the brokenness it breeds and how we are warped and deformed by these lies”, he says. “For example, the Christian Nationalist movement has formed an alliance with White Supremacist groups and together they have taken over the Republican party and see LGBTQ+ people and non-whites as genetically and even mentally inferior and believe all undesirables must be forced either to convert to Christianity and adhere to the teachings of the Bible as interpreted by them or they must be removed in order that purity be restored to ‘their’ nation. They now believe Democracy is not the way to achieve these goals. Any sort of pretence of tolerance that may have seemed to develop over the past several decades has all but vanished. It feels like the U.S. in is free-fall mode.”

Another abiding theme for the record is parenthood. Three songs, Father (“one of the best I’ve ever written”), with its redolent echoes of the stab and haunt of Pale Green Ghosts, Mother and Son and the hymnal Daddy, which explodes from a mordant chrysalis verse to its colourful butterfly chorus, make up the spine of the record. “Father contains both the adult and the child. Daddy is from the perspective of the child. I’m talking about the way that I relate to men as I go out into the world, because of the confusion I was brought up in about what it means to be a man.”

This bleak confusion underpins a particularly emotional new chapter in the novelistic solo life of John Grant. The artist is building a world, with new episodes augmented by new textures. In this respect, the presence of Ivor Guest is almost like a typesetter’s art. How best to convey the sad overview that the meek will not just be denied the world, but will be made its optimum scapegoat?

“We could often only work for two weeks at a time, it was so intense,” says Grant, before recalling one episode in the studio. “Ivor assembled a team of incredible musicians. Dave Okumu [from The Invisible] is such an incredible guitar player. He came into the room when we were playing the demo of Father and just immediately started doing what you hear on the record. Robin Mullarkey played fretless bass and blew my mind, and the very talented Sebastian Rochford was on drum detail. There were a lot of moments of magic from everyone.”

Among its unsettling political charge, a record of sometimes spectral beauty, sometimes elegant funk, like opener All That School For Nothing and irresistible first single, It’s a Bitch, emerges. “Father is a pretty simple track, musically speaking,” he explains. “It’s not a complicated composition. But it still feels very rich and layered because we took our time with it. We had to. It couldn’t be done quickly. To me, it’s always about distilling things down to their essential components.

Grant had been thinking of records that had a profound effect on him while making The Art Of The Lie. “The first time I heard Time Its Time, the last song on The Colour Of Spring by Talk Talk; or The Night of the Swallow by Kate Bush, on The Dreaming; or some of Jane Siberry’s material on The Speckless Sky or anything by Cocteau Twins or Dead Can Dance; those were important moments for me in music. And of course there is a bit of the Devo spirit in everything I do in some way or another. There’s a lot of amazing humour in their music but they were also serious as a heart attack. I guess this is one of the important themes in my life; it’s about moments and being able to recognize them and be in them while they are happening in spite of whatever else is going on. It’s being in a taxi, the most normal situation in the world and seeing the grandeur, the sheer weight and majesty of a big city passing by, staring in awe. The absurdity of the world on the outside juxtaposed with the world taking place on the inside. That fascinates me, the ability to capture what it really feels like to be a human.”

That is the chink of light slipping through the greying clouds of a world depleting. Beauty exists. John Grant will allow himself to see it. There is a bottle of salt he keeps in his home in Iceland, a gift from a fan, with a ribbon attached at the top. “There’s a little note on the top of it,” he recalls. “It says ‘each grain of salt contained herein represents a time that your songs have saved my life.’ That was truly a precious gift and it helps to look at that when things get very dark.”

Arny Margret never expected anyone to hear her songs. A homebody who had long worked in her family’s bakery in a small fishing town in the Westfjords of Iceland serendipitously found herself in the little Reykjavik studio of producer Guðm. Kristinn Jónsson—Kiddi, as she’d soon begin to call him—back in 2021. She tracked 10 tunes in a day and soon returned to track 10 more in what would later become the catalyst work for her sensational 2022 debut album, they only talk about the weather —a startlingly lucid snapshot of an indie folk start, tender feelings tucked into alluring melodies. In Margret’s songs, life could be disorienting; in her early work with Kiddi, she reckoned with it, safely.

Following the release of her debut, Marget was touring the world, opening for like minded artists like Leif Vollebekk, Blake Mills, Julian Lage, and Wilco. On the heels of U.S. support dates in Spring 2024, she arrived in Durham, North Carolina, to begin recording her spellbinding second album, I Miss You, I Do, with Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, Hurray For The Riff Raff)—the first of three Americans who co-produced the album alongside her. Despite wanting to try new things and a new approach with this release, Margret found herself feeling already ready to go home, as she missed the comforts of the places she knew and felt anxious about the unknown. Yet soon, sitting in the control room of Cook’s studio, she found resolution as they listened to the playback of “Took the Train ’til the End,” a devastating and personal portrait of how it feels to never feel seen, as if you’re camouflaged from your own life. As the warm piano chords of Cook’s older brother, Phil, cradled Margret’s bittersweet voice and soft guitar, Brad began to cry, stirred by the new shape this song about trying to find self-definition had taken. Margret knew then that the fear of the unknown she’d had was worth it; that her ambitions for her second album were being realized in real time. This was the start of an important journey, an exquisite album.

Margret and Cook cut one other song in Durham, “Greyhound Station,” a complicated number about homesickness, newness, and what it means to not forgive or forget, written days earlier on tour. Soon after, she headed west to Boulder, Colorado, where Gregory Alan Isakov—the songwriter who helped inspire her to play, sing, and write in the first place—keeps his own studio. She briefly met Isakov, but it was producer Andrew Berlin who captured two of the album’s most affecting moments with Margret. On “Crooked Teeth,” above keyboards that feel as haunted as memory and banjo that feels like a reassuring hand on a cold shoulder, Margret sings of schoolyard neglect and the kind of hurt that can last a lifetime if you don’t let it out. The song speaks of family inheritance, as does the album closer “Happy New Year,” where Margret renders the turning of the calendar’s page as a reminder of what is on the verge of being lost and the soon-to-be-vanquished possibility of what’s to come. She sings these feelings with breathtaking candor, while Berlin captures it with perfect mystery and menace.

There was one more stop on Margret’s itinerary of American studios: New York, to start work with Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, Bob Weir, The Hold Steady), another noted producer whose résumé had dazzled her and whose sense of invention in the studio now wowed her. Kaufman took Margret’s songs as invitations to dive in and build textural microcosms. Classical guitar that sounds like a question mark and icy synthesizers that conjure emotional vertigo trace “Maybe I’ve Wasted My Time,” a wistful song of equal parts loss and wonder. And his woozy drums and phosphorescent feedback during “I Miss You, I Do,” both like distant transmissions from Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, reinforce Margret’s sense of longing, as if forever searching for a center that can no longer even hold. Kaufman urged her into new spaces, exactly why she had come.

Margret is the first to admit that so many of her subjects are sad and somber, burdened by the weight of the past. But for the first time in her short yet exciting career, there is a lightness to all of it, too, as if she recognizes that these are only the travails of growing up and that, in these songs, she is moving gracefully toward a future. That becomes apparent during “Born in Spring,” the last song written and one of three songs recorded for I Miss You, I Do, after she had returned to Iceland and reunited with Kiddi (who also mixed the album). A hymn about badly wanting something in your life but knowing the fit will never be quite right, it is strangely buoyant, as if the burgeoning recognition that some things are better left in the past reassures Margret. It is a sign of maturity, of moving forward, perhaps of the kind of growth that comes from putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. I Miss You, I Do depends on moments like this, moments that remind us that life has yet to be lived in its entirety.

The making of I Miss You, I Do affirms exactly that. It was always less about the producers themselves than the process of engaging with the unfamiliar; of overcoming, stretching, and expanding oneself. Ask Margret now if the anxiety, homesickness, fatigue, and general discomfort of leaving Iceland to record in the United States was worth it, and she just laughs knowingly. Of course it was. “The main thing I wanted for this album was for it to be different. When I listen to the last one, I feel like it’s mainly about me and the guitar. It’s very stripped back. I think I wanted to do more–I love banjo, the fuller sound, I love the American sound, so recording all over there made a big difference,” she explains. “All the people that I worked with brought something new to it. I’ve always worked with the same people in the same places; I never thought I could do this, work with all these people who record with some of my favourite musicians. I really admire everyone on this. And pushing myself out of my comfort zone, that’s quite rewarding.” The sounds she encountered, the sights that informed her songs, the grown men she made cry: This is the stuff of I Miss You, I Do, where an already-striking songwriter takes a monumental step forward. She turns new inspirations into a stunning window into the changing ways she sees the world.