What makes this collection so compelling is its refusal to settle into a single genre and stay put. Pop hooks arrive dressed as punk sneers; psychedelic haze curls around indie-rock backbones; grooves slip in sideways when you least expect them. It's a record built by someone who has spent years on stages, buses, and planes rather than in a rehearsal room, and that restlessness bleeds into the arrangements. Nothing here feels static. Songs shift shape mid-verse, lurch from tenderness into theatrical excess, then pull back just as suddenly, leaving the listener slightly winded and grinning.
Kilby's background as a circus performer isn't a cute footnote; it's the organising principle of the whole enterprise. NOW plays like a piece of physical theatre translated into sound — full of tumbles, near-falls, and moments of genuine grace snatched from apparent chaos. The theatricality that made his debut such a cult favourite hasn't been sanded down for wider appeal; if anything, it's been sharpened, given a bigger stage and a louder band.
Lyrically, the album circles obsessively around the present tense — immediacy, acceptance, the strange vertigo of realising that past and future are simply stories we tell about right now. This could easily tip into new-age platitude in lesser hands, but Kilby writes with enough wit and self-awareness to keep it grounded. Love and hope sit next to confusion and doubt without either cancelling the other out; the record trusts its listener to hold contradictory feelings at once, which is more than most pop songwriting bothers to attempt these days.
The production leans into maximalism without losing clarity — layered vocals, unexpected instrumental flourishes, moments where the whole thing threatens to collapse under its own ambition before snapping back into focus. It's the sound of an artist who has clearly absorbed decades of pop history — glam's swagger, punk's brevity, psychedelia's blur — and refused to treat any of it as sacred. Genres get borrowed, bent, and occasionally mocked, always in service of the song rather than the reference.
Comparisons will inevitably be drawn to theatrical pop eccentrics of decades past, but Kilby's voice — literal and figurative — is distinctly his own. There's a warmth underneath the glitter, a sincerity that stops the record from becoming mere spectacle. Even at its most bombastic, NOW feels earned rather than performed for its own sake.
If Dreamlove Obscura was a promising debut whispered about in corners, NOW is the sound of an artist stepping fully into the light and daring the room to look away. It's messy in the best possible sense, ambitious without pretension, and — crucially — genuinely fun to listen to from start to finish. Banquet Darling has delivered a sophomore record that expands rather than repeats, and in doing so has made a serious case for wider attention. Essential listening for anyone who thinks pop music still has surprises left in it.