John, the singular force behind the For You Brother project, has spent the better part of three decades quietly filling notebooks and four-track cassettes with songs that the world, through a combination of bad luck and industry indifference, has conspicuously failed to hear. *Don't You Want Me* is his corrective — a bold, unhurried reassertion that the music always existed, always had worth, and will not be silenced by the bureaucratic whims of a distribution platform with the aesthetic sensitivity of a tax return.

The curriculum vitae of David Penn reads like a lost chapter from the golden book of American jazz apprenticeship. Mainly self-taught, he sharpened his craft under the tutelage of the great Cecil McBee, cut his teeth alongside Cecil Bridgewater and Charlie Persip, and — perhaps most formatively — spent crucial seasons on the road with the inimitable Betty Carter. That last association alone would distinguish a lesser musician; for Penn, it appears to have instilled something close to a philosophy. Carter, famously, had no patience for the merely decorative. She demanded that every note justify its presence. Listening to *Next Step*, the lessons have evidently taken root.

**If pop music has a responsibility — and the best of it always has — it is to take the unsayable and make it undeniable. barDe, on this gloriously impertinent debut single, does exactly that.**

Let's be honest about what British pop has spent the better part of two decades getting wrong. It has confused sincerity with sentimentality, confounded catchiness with cynicism, and produced a generation of artists so terrified of looking foolish that they've forgotten foolishness — glorious, arms-wide, head-back foolishness — is precisely where the best songs live.