Five of the ten songs on Darren Hayman’s new album, I’m Your Team, begin with the word ‘I’. Given that the details he has shared about his recent past include the loss of a close friend, mental health struggles and the exploration of his neurodivergence, this seems less like a demonstration of self-absorption and more like an act of much-needed self-care. Introspection isn’t Hayman’s only songwriting mode – he also excels at sharp-eyed character studies, conceptual flights of fancy, snapshots of under-recorded social history – but it is perhaps his most enduring. On the surface, the songs on I’m Your Team seem to draw from the same source as many of those early Hefner favourites, but the difference is one of perspective. Where those Hefner songs were essentially young things, artefacts of immediacy, these new pieces draw from decades of experience. If they are, by their nature, more considered, then they are also more universal.
And there are a couple of other factors that set these new songs apart. The first has to do with their gestation. Hayman completed them in 2022, right after You Will Not Die, an album considered by many to be a highlight of his solo career. I’m Your Team – which has been sitting on the shelf for the past four years – shares much of that earlier album’s downbeat energy, only more so. It feels like both a distillation and a conclusion of the ideas explored on that earlier record. But it is also an album – like so many Hayman solo albums – built on constraint. In this case, the constraint is a strictly musical one. Hayman uses only a Rickenbacker bass, a TR707 drum machine and, most importantly, a DX7 synth. The DX7 is famous for its ubiquity (it was all over a string of 80s mega-hits) and for how difficult and time-consuming it was to use. This difficulty inspires a certain amount of care and attention, and that in turn seeps into Hayman’s songs and makes those constraints worthwhile.
Proving the point are the two long songs at the heart of the album. Say if You Want Me to Stay sees Hayman put in one of his most tender vocal performances in years over a bleepy synth melody that is almost childlike in its naivety, but the combination of resignation and hope in the lyrics has an emotional maturity that cuts satisfyingly through the tune’s lullaby-like textures. I Refuse sees Hayman at his most measured, patient and close. Here the synth seems to disappear into the background, becoming the song’s atmosphere rather than dictating its melody. Here the overriding emotions are the pain of rejection and an equal and opposite rejection of pain, a quiet and obstinate refusal of the inevitable. The calm unfurling of the synths at the song’s conclusion make you wonder how this could be the same instrument used on decidedly unsubtle pop bangers by Whitney Houston and Phil Collins.
The instrumental I Will Make You New, another of the album’s longer songs, flickers slowly to life, its first two minutes taken up by creeping, dusty electronics before a beat emerges and the tune coalesces into something strangely calming in its blinking, bleary-eyed repetitiveness. Close Your Eyes and Face the Sun, the album’s most outwardly grief-stricken song (and perhaps its most moving), is built around a careful, almost frail bassline. The restraint here, the simplicity of the music contrasting with the complexity of Hayman’s feelings and the vulnerability of his voice, is nothing short of heartbreaking.
There are some slightly more upbeat moments. Darling, All the Time is forthright in its smoky seduction, and here the drum machine comes into its own. It’s like a lost Paul Young demo, minimal and strangely soulful. I Will Paint You is a sweet and guileless paean to the powers of keen observation and loving attention, closely connected to Hayman’s more recent career as a watercolour artist. Words Fall Out of Me is the perfect combination of sadness, prettiness and Hayman’s trademark way of dissecting human relationships from the inside.
Opener I Made Up My Mind sounds woozy and synthetically tranquilised, and the programmed drums throb slowly like a dying machine heart as Hayman compares himself to a piece of hardware begging to have his memory wiped clean. His world-weary humour comes to the fore on the title track, which closes the album, reminding us that more than anything else, beyond all the constraints, Hayman is a songwriter who can turn out a phrase like no-one else. He has the enviable talent of writing extremely clever songs which always come from the heart, and he’s been doing it consistently and prolifically for thirty years. I’m Your Team sees him at his most undiluted and emotionally stark, delivering some of the best songs of his career.
I’m Your Team (October 16th, 2026) Audio Antihero