Milk City Sweethearts- that combination of wry observation, humble wisdom, unguarded vulnerability, unpredictable humour

He released an album as Big Top Heartbreak, 2016’s Deadbeat Ballads, and followed it with his first album under his own name, 2019’s droll and marvellous Broke. ‘I was signed to a little label in Bristol, but then they went skint,’ he remembers. This time, however, the disappointment didn’t shake his confidence or his resolve. ‘I started writing prose, like ‘flash fiction’, and I’ve begun a novel,’ he says. ‘And I’ve started some creative writing workshops for people who’ve come out of my situation.’

Amid all this activity, the songs that became Milk City Sweethearts began to take shape. Lavene noticed the border between his prose and his songwriting beginning to become porous, and the album feels like a clutch of excellent short stories set to music. Without a label, he recorded the album at home, and assembled it