It is impossible to separate Ben Gregory’s majestic, multi-faceted and emotionally wrenching debut solo album Episode from a period of profound personal upheaval. In 2019 Blaenavon, the much-beloved band with whom he released two widely acclaimed albums, was dissolving. Not unrelatedly, Gregory was receiving treatment in psychiatric hospitals. “Everything on ‘Episode’ comes back to my struggle to interpret, or reinterpret, my life and its core relationships, after having my concept of reality revoked,” he says. “This may sound dramatic, but it’s hard to know if you can trust how you feel about a partner, a situation, a future, when you’ve sat in a hospital bed, torn a newspaper to shreds, sat back and watched it put itself back together.”

Over a ten-day period he wrote the eight songs that would become Episode, songs which sprawl out across the vast emotional spectrum he had experienced in the months beforehand. The instrumentals that back those songs are breath-taking. Gregory – with the help of producer and old friend Blaine Harrison of Mystery Jets and engineer Matt Twaites – pushing his music to limits far beyond anything he’s reached in the past.

Episode is a record of unbelievable capacity, in which is to be found true catharsis, the type of record that does not come around often.