Jacob Alon Releases Debut Album, “In Limerence”

Jacob Alon Releases Debut Album, “In Limerence”

Listen HERE

+ Supports Kae Tempest Across UK + Europe This Autumn

Jacob Alon is very pleased to share their debut album, In Limerence. The record is released today via Island / EMI.

The album was recorded in London and produced by Dan Carey. Listen HERE

Scotland’s Jacob Alon is resetting the button on British contemporary folk music. They certainly possess all the touchpoints; that lilting, otherworldly vocal, colorful story-telling, and fingerpicking patterns traced along their acoustic guitar’s fretboard, but whilst Jacob displays all the classic folksy attributes, they fidget on a different plain entirely. Sure, the voice is ghostly, but often evokes that of a tortured angel; the darkest of lyricists laced with jet-black humor. Bleakly beautiful bittersweet symphonies. Scotland’s young Makar in waiting, and In Limerence their opening chapter.

In the coming days, Jacob concludes a handful of in-store performances and headline dates in Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin ahead of two support slots at London’s Royal Albert Hall for Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

A busy Summer festival season (including a debut performance at Glastonbury), is followed by a full European and UK in support of Kae Tempest throughout the Autumn.

 A list of live dates is below.

Jacob Alon Live:

1st June – Assai Records, Edinburgh (in-store)

3rd June – Rough Trade, Liverpool (in-store)

4th June – Manchester @ Band on the Wall

5th June – Glasgow @ Art School

11th June – The Workman’s Club, Dublin

14th June – Best Kept Secret, Hilvarenbeek

17th June – Supersonic Records, Paris

18th June – Royal Albert Hall, London (w/ Yeah Yeah Yeahs)

19th June - Royal Albert Hall, London (w/ Yeah Yeah Yeahs)

27th – 29th June – Glastonbury Festival

12th July – Even Flow Festival, Cologne

13th July – Valkhof Festival, Nijmegen

24th July – Trades Club x Happy Valley Pride, Hebden Bridge

25th July – Latitude Festival, Suffolk

26th July – Deer Shed Festival, Yorkshire

1st August – Wilderness Festival, Oxfordshire

10th August – Ypsigrock Festival, Palermo

15th August – Green Man Festival, Brecon Beacons

30th August – Palp Festival, Val de Bagnes, Switzerland

12th October – BOZAR, Brussels (w/ Kae Tempest)

13th October – Élyśee Montmatre, Paris (w/ Kae Tempest)

16th October – Kafe Antzokia, Bilbao (w/ Kae Tempest)

18th October – Lisboa Ao Vivo, Lisbon (w/ Kae Tempest)

19th October – Sala Riviera, Madrid (w/ Kae Tempest)

21st October – Le Rocher de Palmer, Bordeaux (w/ Kae Tempest)

22nd October – La Cooperative de Mai, Clermont-Ferrand (w/ Kae Tempest)

23rd October – Transbordeur, Lyon (w/ Kae Tempest)

25th October – Hacienda Roma, Rome (w/ Kae Tempest)

26th October – Estragon, Bologna (w/ Kae Tempest)

27th October – Gabrique, Milan (w/ Kae Tempest)

29th October – Kaufleuten, Zurich (w/ Kae Tempest)

30th October – Les Docks, Lausanne (w/ Kae Tempest)

1st November – Astra Kulturhaus, Berlin (w/ Kae Tempest)

2nd November – Uebel & Gefährlich, Hamburg (w/ Kae Tempest)

3rd November – Live Music Hall, Cologne (w/ Kae Tempest)

5th November – TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht (w/ Kae Tempest)

6th November –Effenaar, Eindhoven (w/ Kae Tempest)

8th November – O2 Academy Brixton, London (w/ Kae Tempest)

9th November – O2 Academy, Bristol (w/ Kae Tempest)

10th November – Albert Hall, Manchester (w/ Kae Tempest)

12th November – O2 Academy, Edinburgh (w/ Kae Tempest)

13th November – Vicar Street, Dublin (w/ Kae Tempest)

About Jacob Alon…

Growing up in Fife and raised by a young single mother, Alon was surrounded by winding woods beyond the sprawling housing estates, which lacked glamour but instilled in them a determination to make their own fun.

Growing up without much music in their household (“my family’s idea of musical brilliance was whoever was on The X Factor”), Alon then taught themselves guitar and singing on YouTube as a teenager after finding a dusty nylon-string guitar in a cupboard at their grandmother’s house. “I never really liked rules and I didn’t take well to the dogmatic and creatively devoid process of classical musical education,” they say. “It was quite empowering, being able to take it into my own hands.”

It was Alon’s friends at school that introduced them to Nick Drake, David Bowie, and more, and they had finally found their tribe. At school, they formed the bands The Pleaser Tweezers and TRAMADOL NATION and primarily made songs to make their friends laugh and take power away from some of the more toxic characters at their school. Though songwriting wasn’t taken that seriously at the time, “music became a tool with which to reclaim a bit of power over my life,” Alon says.

After feeling a lack of support and encouragement towards music from their family, Alon instead enrolled in first medical school, and then to study theoretical physics. “I thought I wanted to save the world somehow, to help people,” Alon says. “But I think I really just wanted love and respect from my family. When I finally got it, I fell into a deep depression. That’s when I realized I can’t keep living to please other people.” Despite this newfound obsession with music, Alon never considered a career in it and was actively discouraged from it. “I remember a family member telling me, as a child, I’d be a poor fool to ever become a musician. And it stuck with me.”

It was while living alone in lockdown, and after dropping out of university for the second time (“I realized I was living someone else’s dream”), they picked up the guitar again – inspired by the bewitching playing of Nick Drake and Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker – and “found the thing that brings me this all-consuming curiosity”. Through the discovery of open tunings, they played the guitar almost as if discovering it again for the first time. They might have gotten into music through a “desire to be exceptional and to get love where I didn’t feel it from the inside out,” but an eventual deeper love and safety in the format came from making choices for themselves and not anyone or anything else.

After COVID, Alon tried to move to London to start a music career, but all-too-common run-ins with shady landlords and declining mental health took the artist back up north, where they took out a bank loan and decided to live in a van and travel around Europe, before returning home to work in a series of queer nightclubs, vowing to never pay another penny to a landlord. They also became a regular at Edinburgh’s lauded folk clubs, becoming a core part of a scene that they initially saw as “aloof and impenetrable” but grew to feel truly at home in. At these nights, musicians would play anything from old Gaelic Walking songs and forgotten Scottish folk tunes to Leonard Cohen and Britney Spears. “I was looking for approval again, but in a good way this time,” they smile.

Getting songs ready to perform at the Wednesday sessions at the Captain’s Bar brought a new intensity and pace to their songwriting, as well as excavating feelings about their life and ostracisation from their family. “Suddenly, I was able to translate deep, deep things within me and pour them onto a page – and I knew that I could trust this small group of misfits - young and old - to receive them first.”

In this time, Alon also found what they describe as their “chosen family” within the local queer scene, who encouraged them to flourish. “We hold each other up and I owe so much to them,” Alon says of their community. Alon’s queerness is also embedded in every song they make, as in their entire life, and is an integral part of them as an artist.

At the time they were doing the rounds at the folk clubs, Alon was working in a small coffee shop and playing the archetypal hopeful artist, gigging any time and place people would have them and praying for a big break.

Though their first songs have flickers of Lenker, Nick Drake, Rufus Wainwright and other titans of modern-day songwriting, Alon also feels like a limitless artist. While their raw power shines through clearest with just a voice and guitar, they have the personality and panache of a pop star and has flirted with the idea of a future turn towards electronic music. In whatever sonic guise, their commitment to devastatingly honest and frank lyricism, and to pulling humour and warmth out of despair, makes them a truly special new voice.

Throughout all of the twists and turns of their childhood and young adulthood, the love they didn’t receive and then learned to give themselves, music has remained the freest and most effective way for Alon to make sense of the world. In finally sharing that wisdom and beauty with others, they make the deeply personal universal and reaffirm the unrivalled power of the form.