Cradling an uncomplicated guitar, a man in trousers of artful proportion pours tender tales into your ear.

The singular voice of sensitive storytelling, occasionally surreal singer-songwriter, Sweet Baboo, also known as multi-instrumentalist musical polymath Stephen Black, returns to the cut, thrust and cacophony of the music world by announcing the release of his seventh studio album, The Wreckage.

Despite several years of contributing to the recorded and live pursuits of other musicians (among them Gruff Rhys and Cate Le Bon) — as well as the release of two albums with Paul Jones under the duo’s acid-ambient piano and clarinet project Group Listening –The Wreckage is Stephen Black’s first output as Sweet Baboo since 2017.

Determined to reconcentrate his energies on his solo music and beholden only to himself, Black took a sledgehammer to the Sweet Baboo foundations; picked through the bricks; turned them over in his ha