The Midnight Ache isJohn Blek’s follow-up to last year’s rawly honest Cheer Up. It seems the more albums he releases, the musically mellower he gets. His tenth studio album is a lo-fi, laid-back affair adorned with cello (Moritz Brümmer), viola (Filip Sommer) and piano (Brian Casey), evoking the likes of Beck (circa Sea Change), Ron Sexsmith and Elliot Smith. The songs are rooted in themes of home, as reflected in the album cover featuring pressed flowers from his garden, and were mostly self-produced in a studio Blek built with his own hands. While not wholly a dark night of the soul implied in the title (the name he gave those sleepless insomniac hours lying in bed, overwhelmed by everything that was going on), those shadows do hover.
With Blek playing strummed guitar and mellotron, his vocals echoey, the album opens with the 45-seconds epiphany of I’ve Been (“I was born in the light/I was blinded now I see it/There before my eyes/All that I can be, I’ve been”), leading, in what feels like a sentence continuation, with Better, the first of several to feature Ciara O’Leary Fitzpatrick, on backing vocals and with a puttering drumbeat from Davey Ryan, a dreamily swaying apology (“I can be better, I will be better/I can be yours, just yours/I will right my wrongs, curse you silver moon/Held up to the light/You can see right through me”).
Adding dobro to the mix, riding tumbling chords and a steady walking rhythm, Coming Down is a softly sung number about the euphoria of falling in love (“Taking me with you back to your place/Under the streetlights out of the day/There in the darkness you were the light /Into the evening out of my mind… I might be In love with the/Idea of you and me /Come and help me down/I’m 10 feet off the ground/Floating in mid air”), and the line “I’d wear your t-shirt to make you smile” conjures one of those cute romcom moments.
Working backwards, if that’s about the life-changing moment, then, Casey on Wurlitzer with a staccato repeated drum beat, the title of the poppily buoyant Before You with its shuffling dance rhythm pretty much tells its own story (“If you only knew what I’d been through/All those years before you…I was lost before you…the broken voice in the midnight choir”).
Using the imagery of tattoos (“the scars on my skin remain… of names long since forgotten”), he describes the rhythmically undulating shuffle of the nigh tropical Black & Blue as “an ode to the marks and bruises that decorate our pasts (and) offer up the road signs to help us to hopefully become better”.
If the sardonically named Cheer Up was a call to get himself out of a funk, then this album is very much about moving on into a brighter light, with the wryly titled chimingly fingerpicked and drum puttered Mr Misery having him “trying to find some piece of mind/Far from all the granite and the grey”, rising above the negativity (“Midnight bar fight little left to lose/He burned the bridges down/High on a stool the hapless fool/Medicates the midnight ache away”) and “bidding my farewells/To Mr Misery”.
An interlude, Indistinct Chatter is just that, a guitar and piano instrumental recording featuring the ambient snatch of voices from Kelham Island Tavern, Sheffield, that speaks to the all too familiar scenario of a musician struggling in vain to break through the audience’s disinterest.
Blek taking up the ukulele, his voice huskier, the walking rhythm 747 with its leaving on a jet plane letting go storyline and written in 2023 at the start of a tour returns to a downbeat narrative of a relationship fallen apart (“The rolling waves of parting tears/The tender ache of wasted years…the poison of our bitter tongues/The fighting words, the things we’ve done”), signed off with the bittersweet sadness of “I tried to forget your face, I never will/You’re all that I’ve known. I love you still, I always will”.
It musically and thematically spills over into the strings arrangement of the empathetic With You (“in an empty hotel bar/And you’re dressed up to the nines/Hoping vodka kills the pain…Thought the solitude would serve/Help find the peace that you deserve/You were wrong/But I was right there with you”), but, while “the hill grows ever higher” and “no one finds it easy”, it also offers encouragement that this too will pass (“Fallow fields are yours to sow/Your uneasiness will go/From you as the season flow”).
It comes to a close with an ambivalent mix of resignation and hope, the crooned slow shuffling Mother’s Eyes moving from regret (“What innocence I knew was wrestled by the truth …if I could have it back/The virtue of my youth, I’d take it/And be on my way”) to a start anew salvation (“Only in my mother’s eyes/She sees me as a newborn child/Laid bare on a virgin sheet of white”). And so it ends with the vaguely Latin American rhythmic hues of Heart Shaped and an ebb tide of loss and heartbreak (“for all that could have been/For now is over…Held my body to your body/Tears fell from our eyes /Made the waters rise”).
Blek wears his vulnerabilities and anxieties openly, just as he does his hopes and heart, resulting in another sublime album that underscores his standing among the Irish greats. Now a father, it’ll be interesting to see where this new life takes him and his music on the next album.
The Midnight Ache (January 16th, 2026) Bigger River Recording Co.
Order via: John Blek Direct | Bandcamp