*Blue Honey* is the second of three singles preceding his debut album *An Apology Letter To All My Ex-Girlfriends*, and it is the kind of track that makes you feel faintly embarrassed for the people who are currently streaming whatever hollow confection sits atop the charts this week. It is unhurried. It is a little strange. And it has the uncommon decency to trust its listener.<\/p>
The title alone does considerable work before a single note is played. Blue Honey. The pairing is instinctively contradictory \u2014 one cold, one warm; one melancholic, one indulgent \u2014 and Maradona exploits that tension with the quiet confidence of a man who has spent a long time in a small room getting this particular thing exactly right. The sweetness is always undercut. The warmth is always slightly bruised.<\/p> Sonically, Maradona operates in the space between the late-90s Britpop hangover and something more nakedly American \u2014 the kind of music that would have felt entirely at home drifting out of a pub jukebox in 2001, right after everyone had stopped pretending they still cared about the second Oasis album. There is guitar work here that understands the difference between being loud and being heavy, and Maradona \u2014 taking clear cues from the mordant swagger of Noel Gallagher \u2014 understands that a well-placed chord change can do the emotional labour of an entire verse if you let it breathe. He lets it breathe.<\/span><\/p> What distinguishes him from the considerable pile of similarly-influenced guitar acts clogging up every open mic night from Bristol to Edinburgh is the wit lurking behind the sentiment. Maradona is, by his own admission, deeply indebted to stand-up comedy \u2014 to the art of landing something painful with a timing that makes the audience laugh before they realise they’ve been got. You feel this in *Blue Honey*. The lyrical impulse is not to wallow but to observe, to turn the moment slightly sideways and examine it with one eyebrow raised. It is the difference between self-pity and self-awareness, and it is a significantly harder line to walk than most songwriters seem to appreciate.<\/span><\/p> The production does not overcrowd the song. This is rarer than it ought to be. The temptation, particularly for independent artists keen to signal their sophistication, is to fill every available frequency with something \u2014 a synth pad, a string swell, a background vocal that probably seemed essential at two in the morning. Maradona, to his considerable credit, resists. *Blue Honey* has room in it. It has air. It sounds like a track that was recorded by people who knew when to stop.<\/span><\/p> Whether Maradona actually cuts through the music industry’s infinite layers of nonsense \u2014 as he has publicly declared his intention to do \u2014 remains, for now, an open question. The industry in question has a remarkable tolerance for being cut through and remaining, somehow, entirely intact. But on the evidence of *Blue Honey*, he has something considerably more durable than ambition. He has a voice, a perspective, and the good sense to know that the best pop music is not the loudest or the most lavishly produced, but the most honest.<\/span><\/p> File this one away carefully. You will want to be able to say you were early.<\/span><\/p> *Blue Honey is available now on Spotify. The debut album ‘An Apology Letter To All My Ex-Girlfriends’ is forthcoming.*<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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