Ambitiously expanding his sound across the full-length format, Lewis projects silvery moonlight on the complexities of the city.

Ahead of the release of his second album, Mark William Lewis described his music as a magic realist imagining of the city, influenced by growing up in Deptford. His music evokes the image of an endlessly unfolding Barbican: high, concrete walls which preclude sunlight, brutalist concrete plop art which defies utility in both a practical and artistic sense. ‘Mark William Lewis’ is performed against a backdrop of a dark night sky. It is like the musical equivalent of those paintings where it’s just a canvas of ink, with slivers of white carved into the blackness: an examination of negative space. This is an album that occupies darkened exterior balcony walkways twenty stories high, those counterintuitive entrances to sixties housing projects which make the place seem like a psychological fortress. It is realist and gritty, but Lewis’ dreamy, slowcore-imbibing approach to art rock gives it an abstract, cut-up feeling that suggests a dreamlike fantasy – that can sometimes turn nightmarish.

The album begins with ‘Still Above’, a rigid white-boy funk that recalls David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’. Its subdued brass feels like a hauntological memory of Motown production, imbued with MWL’s trademark angst. The song introduces addiction as a core theme (“For so long these habits made me sick / The ones I could never seem to kick”), but MWL uses the topic more as a metaphor than for biographical detail – the things we do to get us through the night, be they futile attempts at love or indulgences in the opiate of “phone light”. The most notable example is lead single ‘Seventeen’, which comes about as close as Elliot Smith ever came to a bonafide pop song. Jamie Neville’s guitar work comes to the fore on ‘Socialising’. His repetitive, atmospheric style perfectly complements the sparsity of MWL’s songwriting, acknowledging that the notes which aren’t played are just as important as the ones that aren’t.

If there is one criticism that might be levied against Mark William Lewis, it’s that his credibility as a poet – he has cited T.S. Eliot and James Joyce as some of his earliest influences – is sometimes limited by surprisingly surface-level observations. ‘Ugly’, for example, comes across as pretty much standard emo fare (“There’s parts of me you might find ugly / Stubborn, selfish, debased”). It doesn’t leave much up to the imagination. Luckily, MWL has the kind of voice that permeates his words with poignancy. Having caught the album launch at Rough Trade East, I heard first-hand how his voice, deep and clear, conveys a built-in atmosphere. The immaculate tone of his voice extends to his harmonica, which is second to none. Album closer ‘Ecstatic Head’ is underpinned by a shimmering, staccato harmonica work which brings the instrument perhaps the closest it has ever come to sounding shoegaze.

Mark William Lewis cemented his reputation as a minimalist, vibe-curating singer-songwriter on his Dean Blunt-adjacent 2022 debut EP, ‘Pleasure Is Everything’. He could have continued to ride the straightforward sound it established without complaints from anyone. But this self-titled record is something altogether more ambitious, never deviating from his characteristic sound, but expanding it with lush ambience, reverb-foregoing intimacy and mind-expanding guitar sounds. Darkness is not darkness, but rather a privation of light. This album explores every part of the spectrum between light and dark, exposing the many shades of monochrome. In the process, Mark William Lewis projects silvery moonlight on the complexities of the city, illuminating greyscale concrete to reveal its nuance.