More about: Tom Odell

When you think of Tom Odell, ‘Another Love’, blasts into your head with a certain kind of sentimental urge - one that teenagers pretended they were in, mums with loves lost to the wind were nostalgic over, and dads sang not so low-key in the shower to. Three years later and Tom Odell is a slightly older, wiser, and a somewhat hungrier version of himself.

Now, he's a vegetarian trying to turn vegan (which he confesses is “fucking difficult”), but refining his cooking skills in chickpea stews aside, he has created a new album too. Monsters encompasses many true versions of Odell we never knew existed.

“It wasn’t until I started writing Monsters that I realised what the album could be about and I felt like, without getting too metaphorical, that there was this sort of monster in a way. I guess it was my anxiety that had been following me for so long and I was ignoring its presence and not speaking or telling anyone about it. Like a lot of people, I was stoically trying to get through it and get through each day that came. In a way, it felt like when I finally turned around and faced it and writing this song about how it actually felt, that was the beginning of writing the album. I felt like I could suddenly write about anything, which was an amazing feeling.” 

The album was co-produced with songwriter Laurie Blundell and producer Miles James, a pair of Odell describes as forward-thinking, progressive musicians: “I think we all pushed each other to make something as contemporary as possible” he tells us. This is evident in the Frank Ocean scribbles of synth manipulations and intimate jargon that separate the tracks from stories of the soul to snippets of the mind. “I was interested in the way people consume content today: music or anything. It’s so attention deficit...we can’t look at anything for more than two minutes without getting bored. TikToks only exacerbated that further. There’s a degree of schizophrenia that I wanted the album to have, this ADD, caffeinated world. Trying to make something beautiful and deep within that space was the challenge, you know?” 

It takes a few moments to look past the image of the man and his piano in order to be met by a slightly darker, electronic version of Odell, energetically talking about heavy shit and using the melting pot of various styles now inherent in pop music to his cool and collected advantage.

“I think the state of what streaming has done to popular music… like it’s incredible what is considered pop music today. It’s so progressive, I mean more progressive than ever perhaps. And I think young people’s desire to have the lyrical content, like that song ‘Your Power’ by Billie Eilish, that’s considered a pop song by the biggest pop star in the world, and it’s such a deeply nuanced and complex lyric. What an age to be living in.”

Pop has evolved dramatically since Odell’s previous albums, but is the music industry forgiving to artists who need the time out to look after their mental health? Odell bursts my bubble and assures me there is no suited and booted music industry boss to fend off… that he knows of. “Most of the artists I’ve ever met are almost always sensitive and vulnerable people. And often… you know it’s not mad to say that they commonly are afflicted with mental health problems. And I think the music industry is very adept and clever at turning that into something beautiful actually and something that the world can hear and learn to love. But I don’t think they’re very good at helping those people to deal with those problems when they aren’t so productive and I think that they certainly need to get better at that.” 

Monsters track ‘Money’ is loudly suggestive of the pressures to be successful, with the line “if you wanna be happy, you gotta make more money” putting it all quite simply. The pressures this track points to are what Odell claims to be more personal than professional, a universal problem we can all unwillingly relate to: 

“I just feel like there’s a treadmill that we’re all stuck on. It doesn’t matter how much [money] you’ve got, you’re always made to feel like you don’t have enough. You know, nothing is rewarded so highly as material wealth and I think we’re living in an age where we do shout on social media about how successful we are constantly”.

Odell’s personal insights into his own mental health and struggles with panic attacks over the years have brought a somewhat vulnerable aura of rawness and truth to his music. But have people been welcoming to his unapologetically open arms? “It’s amazing when you’re honest and how the world responds with honesty. I feel it’s been amazing when I’ve talked about my struggle with panic attacks: people responded with their own experience of similar things. I find that incredibly powerful and moving actually and I would say it gives my job a whole new purpose.” 

Could you go as far as to say that writing about your mental health has almost been a form of therapy? 

“I think it’s definitely powerful. I feel like the most therapeutic bit has been actually talking to fans about it now, interestingly. It definitely helped. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s solved anything, like whilst I was writing and recording it I was still struggling somewhat with the same problems. It’s been more recently that they’ve got better. But honestly, I felt invigorated by it, energized that I was writing about something that wasn’t metaphorical it was just there. It was this real thing and I had to write about it. And then I just felt emboldened and just felt like 'oh well now I’m gonna write about shit I fucking care about'”. 

Monsters, which is out on Friday (9 July) was produced with an MPC drum machine and a vintage Moog synth, new gadgets Odell was introduced to by Mile James in the absence of a band. But although Odell tries and tastes the neverending gobstopper of pop, his acoustic skill is still ever-present and is uniquely framed by a clashing verse that suddenly exposes the bareness. 

“I really wanted to have little, very unfiltered snippets that feel almost a bit uncomfortable to listen to. Because to me, that’s what it felt like at the time of writing the album. I also like showing the process in a way. A lot of those ideas were very chaotically recorded in a minute and a half but they’re next to something that is maybe a little bit more considered and took much longer to make.” 

He confesses that having two versions of the title track was initially an accident, but one he is glad happened for his own peace of mind and has become the track that dusts the album off in an old fashioned Odell way. “I had a pretty severe anxiety attack before I was about to put out 'Monster' and I just felt I couldn’t accept putting out a version that wasn’t the acoustic version. I became obsessed with it. The important thing for me is that I felt it was such a delicate subject and everyone was talking about it being a single and I just felt like we’re missing the point… it’s about having a panic attack and loads of people were messaging me about having panic attacks. I just felt I can’t put something out and commercialise it - it has to be rawer and about the lyric.” 

The importance placed on the lyric is why Odell has somehow managed to keep his blonde scruffy head above the overly-commercialised water of pop. His feet might be wet - but no one is complaining. Monsters reflects the experimental and boundless nature of pop today. Odell has arrived back on the music scene when five-course fine dining is out the window and pot lucks are all the rage. Odell brings his own dish from Eastern Mediterranean Vegetarian Cooking and samples those that take his fancy... (slipping a few blocks of cheese in his pocket along the way).

Monsters arrives 9 July via Sony.

More about: Tom Odell