Beautiful new record by Joseph Futak out today, Walking The Sea Wall. Joe sent me this record when I was in Lisbon this January and asked me to write a bio for him. I listened to it whilst walking the sea wall on a beautiful day there, then sat on the beach with it. Made me cry real tears! The bio I wrote for him is below!! Go listen to record today.
Joseph Futak – Walking The Sea Wall (Blue Flowers, 2025)
On Walking The Sea Wall, Joseph Futak’s first release on Blue Flowers, love, nostalgia and grief, the three most complicated spectres of the human experience, are untangled and repackaged in front of its audience’s eyes. Over its 8 songs, London’s brightest producer steps into his own voice, shedding expectations along the way. The result is a breathtaking entry into this century’s pantheon of perfect baroque pop records.
There is a bleary eyedness to the record. Songs are soft around the edges, like a morning’s first thought. Waking up in love, waking up in grief, waking up in pain, Walking The Sea Wall lives in those moments spent trying to grasp the day’s first reality. Those seconds between dream and truth, when we are blinded by what we cannot quite yet see. Futak finds a way to elongate these minuscule moments, inhabiting otherworldly versions of the life he leads. This is a record written in, and about, tiny pockets of time.
Though Futak has forged a reputation as a South London’s go-to producer, his name fully forged into the recent musical history of that corner of the capital; his own record doesn’t hold the personality of its geography. You’d struggle to slide this work alongside those of whom he’s produced (lilo, Tapir!, piglet, Baggio); but rather it sits alongside a generation of American storytellers whose influence have slowly tentacled their way across the Atlantic in recent years. Phil Elverum, Will Oldham, Bill Callahan and David Berman all spring to mind not just as influences but as contemporaries of Futak; he showcasing an ability to balance heartbreaking honesty and a humour which is often self-deprecating, and always tonally appropriate. Just as those forefathers of baseball-cap-country can within the space of just one line simultaneously elicit belly laughs and up-all-night ruminations on life’s biggest unknowns, Futak has already mastered the skill of finding humour in his own heartbreak. On album closer, Alicante, co-written on a retreat with friend and collaborator Matthew Herd, he imagines his protagonist falling in love with strangers in an airport departure lounge; “We’ll say we met in Alicante, eating crisps beside the pool / The waiters dressed in uniform because they’re mostly still in school” he croons in the chorus.
That playfulness runs throughout Walking The Sea Wall; though it requires some digging. Futak’s voice is devastatingly deep and entwined with sorrow (the Leonard Cohen comparisons will spring to mind almost immediately upon hearing the first few footsteps of Practice Run, the album’s opening track) yet when you dig deeper into his words, his delivery, you’ll find a lightness, a gentleness. The opening lines of Emily perhaps exemplify his unique brand of joyful sorrow best; “Emily, why won’t you look at me? / Is there something behind me that’s so interesting?”
On Practice Run he sings “I hold out, start to speak / Let it all fall in rain and sleet” from the back of his throat. The weather is a constant theme in Futak’s writing, where cold air and rain often meet in the face of his protagonists. There’s often the feeling he is overcoming something.
And often he is.
The song ends with him holding out a hand to a character we’ve not yet met. A blurred print of a hazed scene, nothing quite yet in focus. As Futak’s voice guides us through the record, these characters’ faces slowly shift into focus, these landscapes slowly begin to make sense.
On the following track, The Stranger, Futak’s songwriting showcases maturity beyond his years, a masterful withholding of moment and melody as the song ever so slowly puffs out its chest and blossoms before your eyes. Lyrically he showcases an innate ability to crush a thousand feelings into a single line; “And every little thought finds its place / Nothing ever changes, but it never looks the same”. It’s not the last time on this record where he sounds like Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle-era Callahan.
The record’s most surprising moment comes from the exceptional Imagining Water, a collaborative piece between Futak and his partner, artist and sculptor Jemima Pike, whose voice repeats the song’s single lyric; “Imagining water spat out of the mouth, collapsing into pieces onto tiled floor”. It’s the most physical lyric you’ll hear all year; and the improvised piano which first sits beneath these words before manoeuvring its way back to its mark at centre stage acts as testament to the ambient music and musique concreté which Futak consumed obsessively during the making of this record.
“We created the loop together, recording and rerecording the vocal phrase in real time in an open room until the phrase dissolved into nothing but the tone of the room. I then took this recording, worked out the key of the notes formed by the room and improvised piano and synth over the top. This ephemerality became a key part of the recording process of this album.”
Many of the ideas on this record were birthed from moments of witching hour solitude whilst Futak travelled the world as sound technician and tour manager for Sam Akpro and NewDad. Songs were sketched in 3am departure lounges and sculpted days later back in the comfort of his Hither Green studio; sandwiched between were whistle stop tours to all corners of the continent. In this period in which predawn flights became part of his weekly routine, Futak’s life was soundtracked by Brian Eno’s ambient works and Claire Rousay’s NTS shows.
“This overarching mood influenced the atmosphere of the album immeasurably and I wanted to make something that reflected my experience with these pieces of music, and provide for the listener what they provided for me – almost by reflecting it directly, a sense of shelter from the surrounding chaos of life.”
This life is loud, and solitude as an act of self care is a theme which runs throughout Walking The Sea Wall. In December 2023, Futak travelled to the bungalow of his grandpa, who had recently passed away. An opportunity to, as he puts it, “slay this beast of songwriting that I had been avoiding for years”. Here he wrote the EP’s greatest triumph, Light of Day, as he sat alone in his grandfather’s greenhouse. A rare chance to sit still bore a moment of genius, and proved the jumping off point for the record; Futak returned to London on New Year’s Eve and drunkenly told anyone who’d listen that he was going to make a record in 2024.
And he did. Throughout the following year songs trickled out, and he revitalised some older ones too:
“Day Like Today was written in the first lockdown before my first EP had come out, about some friends who were in rough spots, but also physically quite isolated from the rest of us, and I was wanting to reach out to them. This song went through a lot of different versions over the years and I never managed to get one where it felt right, until I sat down at the piano in September 2024 and tried just playing it through as simply as possible. I then took a lunch break and came back and played the take that made it onto the EP – when it felt right it just clicked.”
“Emily was largely a break up song from 2022, and is probably the closest thing to a bitter song on the project. I completely forgot about it for a couple of years until I found the voice note on my phone in 2024 and realised it wanted to be recorded properly.”
Though these songs are born of grief and pain, there is an inherent optimism to Futak as a writer, and as a person. At the heart of this record is love. Love for Pike, who also contributed the cover art, love for his friends and family and, most crucially, his love for himself. These are healing songs, Futak finding peace within the world around him. Finding room to stand on his own two feet, finding room to face the world, finding room to sing.
“Making this album felt like a great act of kindness to myself, and in this there was a lot of joy in the exploration and the experience of making music with my friends and people I love. I hope sharing that with a listener can impart some of that to them too.”
