*Under The Clocks* is the second single to emerge from this extraordinary creative engine, following *Walking Through Hell*, and it announces something the debut perhaps only hinted at — that James has found, somewhere amid the avalanche of material, a genuinely compelling voice.
The song is anchored by acoustic guitar, which in lesser hands signals an immediate retreat into coffeehouse vacancy. James avoids that particular trap. The guitar work here is purposeful, rhythmically grounded, more interested in momentum than ornamentation. The production, handled by Patrick Carre and Simon Groves and mixed at Artisan Studios, has the good sense to stay out of the song's way while giving it just enough shimmer to feel like something broadcast outward rather than muttered inward.
The Noel Gallagher comparison invoked in the press materials is less absurd than it might initially appear, and more instructive than merely namedropping the obvious. What Gallagher understood — and what too many songwriters of the supposedly confessional school have forgotten — is that a song exists in a room, among other people. The great anthems are not about the singer; they are addressed to the listener. They presuppose a crowd even when sung alone. *Under The Clocks* carries that same presumption of community, that invitation to arrive somewhere together. The chorus has genuine lift, the kind that doesn't require you to understand every lyric on first hearing to feel its pull. You are invited to lean in. Most listeners will.
What distinguishes James from the considerable noise of acoustic-guitar-and-feelings that fills every streaming platform and every open mic night in every city on the planet is a quality harder to name than melody or production value. Call it conviction. The song sounds like it means to be here. It does not apologise for its anthemic ambitions or sand them down into something more palatable and forgettable. It commits, and commitment — unfashionable, unironic, stubbornly present — turns out to be exactly what the song requires.
The broader project rewards attention. James has been documenting his process publicly on Instagram — not the polished highlight reel of the modern artist's social media management, but something rawer, the daily act of sitting down and making work. This is either vanity or admirable transparency, and it reads as the latter. The seventy-five open mic performances are not a detail to be skimmed past. They represent something that has largely disappeared from the way we talk about how musicians develop: the unglamorous education of playing to indifferent rooms until the songs grow stronger than the indifference.
*Under The Clocks* is the sound of that education paying forward. It is not a finished statement — James himself seems uninterested in finished statements, preferring the ongoing, the evolving, the perpetually refined — but it is a song that earns its melodic payoff through structural intelligence and a storytelling instinct that knows when to hold and when to release. The chorus arrives exactly when it should. It does what it promises.
A debut EP apparently looms somewhere further down the year, and if the rate of creative output continues at anything approaching its recent pace, the question will not be whether Frederick James has enough material. The question will be whether he has the ruthlessness to hold back the merely good in favour of the genuinely great. On the evidence of *Under The Clocks*, he might just manage it.
*Single out 17 April.*