Ensoulment

Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024

The The

It’s 1983. Amid a characteristic London downpour, “a broken soul,” feeling the sting of unrequited love, “stares from a pair of watering eyes” up to the window of the object of his infatuation. “Uncertain emotions force an uncertain smile,” sings Matt Johnson, completing the verse to one of The The’s most well-known songs from their official debut album, the era-defining Soul Mining.

More than 40 years later, on “I Want to Wake Up With You,” that same character reenters the frame, in a scene not unlike the one before: “Standing on the corner, in the rain, looking up at your window—again,” croons Johnson in his now signature baritone. “A long time ago, another life, and though not a boy, barely a man. 'Just bring whatever you hope to find,' so I brought my soul and a bellyful of wine.” It might be an alternate ending to an old story. It might be Johnson finding himself in a familiar place under different circumstances. But whatever it is, it’s an acknowledgment that our perspective, as it shifts and morphs over the years, sharpens as it softens. That we ultimately bring to life's experiences whatever we want to get out of them. And maybe it takes you four decades to realize that.

For as long as Johnson has been making music, whether on his own or with the rotating cast of musicians who’ve come to define The The, he’s been musing on existence—and what it means to have a soul. (In case album titles such as Burning Blue Soul,Soul Mining, and now Ensoulment didn’t give that away.) These songs—his first album of new, non-soundtrack music since 2000’s NakedSelf—are rich in those themes, and particularly how one's existence can be so infected by toxic politics. The charging “Cognitive Dissident,” which seems of a piece with his last album’s “Global Eyes,” is a thinking person’s treatise on the contradictions that define modern living. “Some Days I Drink My Coffee by the Grave of William Blake” is a moody ode to pre-Brexit England. And the subdued but biting “Kissing the Ring of POTUS” probably doesn’t really need much spelling out (though it’s worth noting that it’s not about Joe Biden).

Still, Johnson goes deeper on tracks such as “Life After Life” and the intimate and direct “Where Do We Go When We Die?,” which he wrote in tribute to his late father. But where it gets most interesting is on the disorienting “Linoleum Smooth to the Stockinged Foot,” a track written from Johnson’s hospital bed while recovering from an emergency throat surgery, heavily under the influence of morphine. “Beneath glass, the world hushed, is a dream still a dream if you can't wake up?” he asks. “Brain fevered, body limp, in altered states, the truth is glimpsed.”