Kindly Now

Listen closely to the end of Keaton Henson's 2013 album, Birthdays, and you'll hear the sound of a door clicking shut. Listen even closer to the start of 2016's Kindly Now, and you'll hear that same door reopening. In a six-year career in which Henson's work has been as diverse as it has been prolific, it is this small act of opening and closing the door, of letting the world in and shutting it out, which continues to form the struggle at the center of his art. More masterfully than ever before, Henson's third album builds upon the tension between stripped back, transparent confessional piano-ballads, and layered, experimental outbursts of mournful orchestration. Kindly Now is the natural culmination of a six-year journey of broad and fearless experimentation into a range of genres and mediums. Every tool at Henson's disposal is unified and brought to use in this highly wrought and unflinching album which, when experienced as a whole, becomes greater than the sum of it's parts.