Forever (Vinyl)

What happens after happily ever after? And how do you make forever count? These are the preoccupations at the heart of The Big Moon’s buoyant yet beautifully bittersweet fourth album, Forever.

Four years on from last LP Here Is Everything – and a further eight since frontwoman Juliette Jackson first laid the foundations for the band – the London-formed four-piece find themselves in a very different, if similarly challenging, headspace. Where that record was conceived in the context of COVID and found Jackson processing the life-altering experience of new motherhood, Forever examines what’s left when you’ve already checked off many of the major milestones, and is tempered by a first-hand understanding of life’s fragility.

The truth is, the past couple of years have been a big readjustment for Jackson. In 2024, she was diagnosed with a cholesteatoma – a benign but destructive cyst inside the eardrum which has to be removed with surgery. Jackson explains, “I permanently lost most of the hearing on one side, which was pretty much existential, because writing songs is my job and my identity.” Stoic by nature, Jackson forged forward with songwriting regardless but found herself faltering. “I couldn't hear properly, everything sounded out of tune and I was just struggling to find a point at all, just writing these miserable songs I couldn't really hear.”

The answer was to shift her outlook completely, manifesting “a happy ending that didn’t exist yet.” “I just decided to write songs for this imaginary time, one or two years in the future, when I would be all healed and happy again. I didn’t know if I would ever get to that point but, by projecting and almost tricking myself into it, it actually became a really nice way of writing.” It proved an extremely fruitful approach, producing some of the brightest songs of The Big Moon’s career to date. Recorded over three weeks at Norfolk’s Bam Bam Studios, with Kevin Morby-collaborator Sam Cohen co-producing alongside the band, Forever is brimming with hook-heavy alt-pop gems, not least because Jackson had fallen out of love with writing verses.

“Over the years I've got more impatient with music,” Jackson explains with a grin. “I just like getting straight to the point.” As bandmate Celia Archer explains, they hope the album proves uplifting. “They're not trivial songs lyrically or thematically or musically, but Jules has shown us you can face all this stuff and choose to be hopeful and find power from it. Hopefully other people can apply that to their own lives.”