The South London DIY artist reworks his sound in the transformation of an old idea into something completely new.
Photo: Travis Barton | Words: Lloyd Bolton
With his only release of 2024, Slow Dance's Saint Jude is back with a new single, modest in arrangement but affecting not only in its composition but also in its origin. The title, 'To Believe (To Repel Ghosts Part 2)', refers to the closer of his 2022 debut album, 'To Repel Ghosts'. This song, he explains, grew out of his revisiting of an early demo of the track, rebuilding it from that same starting point but taking it in a different direction. The result is his barest production yet, departing from Jude's already intimately DIY sound and reducing it further to voice and slashed electric guitar, a sound that refers closely to the influence of Billy Bragg.
With a release like this, we are offered a tantalising flicker of insight into the workings of the artist, not enough to give away the whole process but enough to feel like we can start to guess at it. We hear what remained relevant from the alternative 'completion' of that idea, and compare what details evolved differently this time. We sense similar musical shapes, similar ghosts, to the other track, but the mood shifts into a more naked form of expression as over the lonely reverb of an isolated electric guitar he sings, "give me something to believe".
With this single, we hear a funny kind of confidence come into Jude's work. This is not the technological confidence to handle an elaborate production but the artistic confidence to strip everything back, to trust in the barest details of a song to carry a feeling sincerely… even where its lyrics remain relatively oblique. As much as a 'Part 2', this could be seen as the twin of the song that we heard first, and as a composition in its own right it pushes the Saint Jude into refreshing new territory.
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