A Jackal’s Wedding
Westerman’s third album, 'A Jackal’s Wedding', is a humid, nocturnal record shaped by constant transition. Written largely in Athens and recorded at night over five weeks on the Greek island of Hydra with producer Marta Salogni (Björk, The xx, Sampha, English Teacher), the album takes its name from a folkloric term for a sunshower, a strange and beautiful contradiction that mirrors the record’s themes of motion, change, and surreal clarity.
Completed shortly after 2023’s 'An Inbuilt Fault', 'A Jackal’s Wedding' feels like a synthesis of everything that’s come before: the live, percussive feel of 'An Inbuilt Fault' woven into the alien textures of 'Your Hero Is Not Dead’. Limited only to the tools present during the initial 5 week recording session, Westerman says “Records exist authentically when tied to time and place. The limitations we imposed make this record authentic by necessity”. Exploring the limits of the equipment at hand, and shaped by the sounds of the environment around it, 'A Jackal’s Wedding' captures an artist learning to enjoy motion: still evolving, still searching, still seeing things that shouldn’t exist.
An Inbuilt Fault
The album's nine songs took shape throughout the depths of the pandemic and soundtrack Westerman’s reckoning with two years of intense isolation, loneliness, heartbreak, and dread. The phrase “an inbuilt fault” itself is an examination of the inherent and innate flaws that make us human – a visceral response to Westerman’s disillusionment with AI and social media during this time period.
Through it all, the album is a live entity, full of breath and idiosyncratic gestures on acoustic instrumentation. It creates a spatial feeling, the sound of musicians assembled in a room, passing evolving ideas back and forth. Co-produced with producer and percussionist James Krivchenia (Big Thief), and featuring an extended crew of Los Angeles associates, 'An Inbuilt Fault' exhibits music that is heavier and more sonically daring than Westerman’s previous work, and it is the most adventurous and unselfconscious songwriting of Will Westerman’s career.
Your Hero Is Not Dead
The debut album from Westerman, Your Hero Is Not Dead is full of supremely crafted songs about moral, political, and ethical grey areas. It is an album of empathy and compassion, struggle and release, and all the ways we contradict and battle within ourselves. Recorded alongside close friend and producer Nathan Jenkins (aka Bullion), they find Westerman attempting to resolve external issues by looking inward. Like a young Peter Gabriel in a late capitalist world, Westerman’s debut falls somewhere between artful soft rock and confessional electronic pop.
