The new album from the South London singer-songwriter shows his talent for capturing the rough edges of human experience and the fractures in modern society.

Lou Terry has long been a songwriter’s songwriter on the scene in London, noted fans including John Cooper Clarke, who caught him at an early gig, and Black Country, New Road, who invited him on tour for a few dates last year. His writing shifts between political, personal and romantic concerns, the thread of consistency being the sense of honesty and accountability behind lyrics that assimilate explicitly modern experiences into timelessly expressive music. His second full length release, ‘Building a Case’, is out now via Oxford DIY label Divine Schism. The album feels like a complete expression of Terry’s ability, an unflinching self-portrait that resonates with an entire milieu who still entertain flights of romanticism in a world that can seem to be bent on destroying us.

Opener ‘Fist Ticker’ speaks to this more universal sentiment. Guided by a folky picked guitar, its lyrics meander through the related worries of the disenfranchised modern liberal, turning attention between capitalist competitiveness, train delays and negative solutions to homelessness, at one point linking so-called “anti-homeless” spikes on benches to increased suicide rates. The comparison of the heart to the fist at the core of this song challenges the idea that humans are innately good, evoking the violence that underlies our society. This consciousness of the hardness of modern existence reverberates through the album, showing up in more personal details like in ‘Coke in the Dream’ about addiction to being “on my phone as soon as I wake” and the lack of time to just “catch up and have cans”, and on ‘Persistent’ in its reflection on the anxiety of renting and the related existential crisis it can cause. Another highlight of the album, ‘Canyon’, captures the frustration of our sense of powerlessness to effect meaningful societal change under these conditions, the metaphor of “throwing feathers into a canyon” perfectly capturing that feeling.

Throughout the record, we also encounter more personal corners of Terry’s experiences. ‘Green Man’ beautifully portrays the aching moment of daring oneself to express true feelings to someone you love. The specifics are to an extent eluded, Terry suggesting the evasiveness that tortures the moment as he notices cars going by, and launches into a memory of half-understood fatherly advice. The song has a lot of parallels with ‘Yellow Top’, which answers it later on the album. That track looks at being “shown the door” and having to “say goodbyes to someone you never thought would leave”. There are a number of similar shapes to ‘Green Man’, particularly in the guitar lines, which makes for a poignant pairing. Incidentally, ‘Yellow Top’ also reminds us that Terry is never too far from pulling out a killer guitar riff.

‘Building A Case’ cements Terry’s reputation as a songwriter and adds a new kind of punch to his sound, with clanging guitars, some excellent bass licks and, where necessary, a studied appropriation of softer folk shades. Comparing with his previous full-length, the charming ‘If I’m Me Who Are the Other Three’, we can hear the evolution in this coalescence of ambitious sounds and confident lyricism, which refuses to shy away from political integrity and personal accountability. In his incorporation of folk details to sensitively written modern stories, one might hear something of Richard Dawson in this record. Equally, with his unabashed use of British idiosyncrasies, there is something of a modern Ray Davies about Terry’s writing (‘Persistent’ in particular feels very ‘Lola vs Powerman…’). As a whole, ‘Building A Case’ is a grand production, capturing the rough edges of human experience and astutely setting them against the social and political troubles of our times.