Jinnwoo releases digital single and announces new album

Jinnwoo

Jinnwoo returns with new album dreamcreatures. released 3rd September. It has been described by Brit and Mercury winning producer Charlie Andrew, who signed him to his label Square Leg Records, as “a beautiful body of work,” and “some of the most gorgeous and curious songs I’d heard for a very long time”.

Jinnwoo’s exquisite new single ‘Your Table’ lays testimony to this, a devastating, yearning meditation on the pain and desperation of unrequited love, with the swell and fall of organ and strings dancing in and out of the song as if from a dreamworld.

No one sounds quite like Jinnwoo. When the Leicester-born artist (aka Ben Webb) first debuted his curious and spellbindingly beautiful music via his debut Your Baby EP in 2016 (Cargo Records), the late Andy Gill of The Independent succinctly described him as “a singular folk talent,” with his debut album, 2016’s Strangers Bring Me No Light (Cargo Records/GF*M Records), being equally as critically-acclaimed.

New album dreamcreatures. was written within the two months of the release of his debut album back in 2016 and captures that point in life where one realises they are no younger young, as well as musing on what Jinnwoo describes as: “A weird mix of nostalgia, regret and looming responsibility. It’s a lot about old relationships, in particular the relationships that can exist between men; friendship, brotherhood, love, jealousy and sex.”

However dreamcreatures. was shelved (until now), with Jinnwoo spending the next five years releasing critically acclaimed albums as part of traditional folk groups Bird in the Belly and Green Ribbons. It was his involvement in the former which resurrected dreamcreatures. when Bird in the Belly member and close friend Tom Pryor “tricked” Jinnwoo into re-recording the songs. As Jinnwoo expands “Tom would set up the microphones and tell me to just play the song through a few times – he’d wander off, and potter in the studio kitchen. He said we were just recording demos.” Tom then took the recordings away and built them up, with dreamcreatures. being a series of first and second takes of vocals, guitar and autoharp, with the rest overdubbed by Tom.  It created – alongside Jinnwoo’s distinctive song-writing and hypnotically original compositions – the paradoxical beauty of dreamcreatures. The album is at once intimate, sparse and haunted with Jinnwoo’s distinctive vocal with its “wilfully jagged edges” (The Guardian) and raw, confessionary story-telling at centre stage, yet also multi-instrumented, layered, rich and always evocative.

dreamcreatures. is a most beautiful return for Jinnwoo. Capturing a bittersweet moment in time that wraps us all in painful nostalgia, where doubt, regret and anxiety rear their ugly heads but our world-weary experiences make us more able to process such emotions., albeit with a newfound cynicism and sadness.  Jinnwoo encapsulates this perfectly in dreamcreatures. which is the sound of an already singular artist literally and musically maturing in front of our eyes.

Under the mantle Jinnwoo, Ben Webb has released the aforementioned Your Baby EP (2014) and a debut album Strangers Bring Me No Light (2016, Cargo Records/GF*M Records), as well as a live Ozzy Wood EP (2016, Cargo Records). As part of alt-folk band Bird In The Belly he has released two albums ‘The Crowing’ (2018, Proper Records/GF*M Records) and ‘Neighbours and Sisters’ (2019, Cargo Records/GF*M Records), as well as self-titled A Capella album (2019, Matiere Memoir Records) as part of folk group Green Ribbon alongside Alistair Roberts, Burd Ellen, Fran Froote (Stick in the Wheel), Jack Sharp (Wolf People), and 1960’s Folk Legend Frankie Armstrong.  He also published his first book ‘Little Hollywood’ (2020) which is a collection of scripts and illustrations.

The songs on dreamcreatures. were written and recorded by Jinnwoo, and produced and mixed by Tom Pryor in Studio 95, Brighton with additional mixing from Charlie Andrew (Alt-J, London Grammar).

’Your Table’ is out today as a digital single accompanied by a video directed by Epha Roe and available to stream via YouTube. The long-player dreamcreatures. follows on 3rd September via Charlie Andrew’s Square Leg Records and will be available on CD, vinyl and digitally. The album is available to pre-order and pre-save here.

Artist’s website: https://www.facebook.com/Jinnwoo

‘Your Table’ – official video: