Following the 2023 debut that established his corner of the map \u2014 somewhere between the rust-belt gravitas of Springsteen and the art-rock restlessness of early Bowie, with the bones of a bluesman underneath \u2014 Palumbo returns not with a reinvention but with a deepening. These are songs that apparently couldn’t fit on the first record, which is an interesting admission: it implies a surplus of material and, more tellingly, a surplus of feeling. You believe him when he says they feel more urgent now than when they were written. That’s the uncomfortable gift of songs built around genuine observation rather than fashion \u2014 they tend to age forward rather than backward.<\/p>
The production, handled once again by Simon Willey \u2014 a man who has coaxed records out of Bryan Ferry and given sonic shape to *The Great Gatsby* soundtrack \u2014 is immaculate without being sanitised. Recorded across London, Bath’s Ashley Manor Studios and the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, the EP carries the particular tension of music made across distances and reconvened: space in the arrangements, breath between the instruments, as though each player arrived with their part fully formed and Willey simply had the wisdom to let it stand.<\/p>
“Know That” opens proceedings with the quiet confidence of a band that has decided, once and for all, what it believes in. It is a declaration before it is a song \u2014 the kind of opening track that tells you immediately whether you are in the right room. You are.<\/p>
“You’re a Blues” follows with a polyrhythmic weight that suggests the influence of Zeppelin’s heavier archaeological work \u2014 the kind of track that feels less written than unearthed, built for endurance and the specific solidarity of shared hardship. The title is addressed outward, which is the key move: not *I have the blues* but *you are the blues* \u2014 the condition as something imposed from without rather than surrendered to from within. It is a subtle but important distinction, and Palumbo makes it count.<\/p>
“Whatever” is the EP’s most straightforwardly combative moment \u2014 riff-driven and deliberately blunt, taking aim at power and excess without the pseudo-intellectual hedging that ruins most protest rock. Palumbo understands something that many of his contemporaries don’t: righteous anger is only compelling when it sounds like it costs something. Here, it does.<\/p>
“Apathy” is the centrepiece and its most technically audacious moment. Built on a 7\/4 time signature \u2014 a groove that lurches with the particular rhythm of modern life slightly out of joint \u2014 it somehow manages to be anthemic. That is a genuinely difficult trick to pull off. Odd meters have a long history of alienating casual listeners; Palumbo and his band make this one feel inevitable, the rhythmic displacement mirroring the lyrical confrontation with consumerism and social disconnection with a precision that is either very clever or very instinctive. Probably both.<\/span><\/p> “Buildings in the Sky” closes the EP and earns its title in the way only good closing tracks can \u2014 by reframing everything that came before it. After four songs spent at street level, in the grit and groove of working-class ambition and modern disconnection, a gaze upward feels neither naive nor resigned. It feels like the only honest response left. The guitar work here is the EP’s most expansive, the arrangements reaching for something beyond the immediate, and the effect is of a record that has said what it needed to say and now permits itself, just briefly, to imagine something larger.<\/span><\/p> What holds all five tracks together is Palumbo’s voice \u2014 not a technically ostentatious instrument, but one deployed with the intelligence of someone who knows that conviction is more compelling than range. He sounds like a man singing from experience rather than imagination, which is, when you think about it, the entire point of blues-inflected rock and roll.<\/span><\/p> *More Tales From the Big Smoke* won’t make Palumbo a household name overnight. The genre he’s working in \u2014 literate, guitar-driven, rhythmically sophisticated rock built for adults \u2014 is not, at this particular cultural moment, the industry’s primary concern. But the industry’s primary concern has never been a reliable guide to what’s worth listening to. Five tracks, eighteen minutes, no filler, no apology. That kind of discipline, in 2026, is rarer than it ought to be.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/www.musicglue.com\/palumbo<\/a>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/span>
<\/span>
<\/span>