ALEX PESTER - Yours

If a good day starts in the morning, a good year starts with its first day, and it bodes well that 2026 opens musically with an album as engaging as "Yours" by Alex Pester, released on January 1st digitally and in a super-limited CD edition of just 25 copies (with a vinyl edition reportedly on the way).

The ninth album from the Bath-based singer-songwriter is yet another showcase of skillful writing and poetic emotional disenchantment, a language that's by now familiar to anyone who has followed his less-than-easy discography. Pester's songs sound pleasant but never comforting, graceful yet aching and emotionally intense - outpourings as powerful as they are fragile, a shining example of inspiration and harmonic purity that never fails to astonish with each new release.

"Yours" is a worthy follow-up to "The English Hymnal", the English songwriter's most tormented and difficult album. These nine songs are pieces of rebirth and renewed trust, a varied assortment of new seeds to be planted and carefully tended for future harvests.

Alex Pester enchants and seduces the listener without tricks or unnecessary conceptual and instrumental trappings. A handful of guitar chords, almost tousled yet finely crafted ("Palisade"), a folk-pop melody brushed with hints of folktronica (the title track), or a light guitar reverb underpinning a bittersweet melody ("Blinded By The Sun") are all it takes to renew one of the most powerful singer-songwriter visions of the last decade.

Never so gritty and raw, Pester gets his hands dirty tangling with rock'n'roll (the guitar scrape of "Pearl And Dean" and the unexpectedly noise-punk clothing given to an otherwise docile "Stories"), strips his most empathetic ballads of any baroque-pop echo ("Sister"), flips perspectives by lending dream-folk tones to one of his most nervous and restless songs ("Maybeth Cuts Her Losses"), sings of happiness in mournful tones ("You Were Happy"), and finally finds comfort in a world of memories that belies his young age (just 24) on the brief but telling closing track "The Old Town", which ends the album leaving an ever-engaging story hanging in mid-air.

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16/01/2026