Puma Blue
Puma Blue
South-London born, Atlanta-based singer-songwriter Puma Blue will perform for the first time in Bucharest this spring – May 31 at Control Club. The artist is currently on a European tour promoting his second album, Holy Waters, released last year.
Tickets are now available via Eventbook.ro.
* Presale : 75 RON (first 100 tickets). Afterwards, the price will go up to 95 RON per ticket.
“I’ve been trying to make peace with death,” smiles Jacob Allen, the singer-songwriter, producer and poet better known as Puma Blue, bashfully aware of the abstract stateliness his avowal holds. “It’s horrible and it’s painful. I’d never say that it isn’t. Yet at the same time, the process of it all can be beautiful.” Death nestles like a sweet creature at the heart of Holy Waters, the highly anticipated follow-up to 2021’s In Praise of Shadows, released September 2023 via Blue Flowers. It’s less a morbid study in mortality, more a chronicle of the graciousness within each repeated cycle of life, death and rebirth, arriving eventually at a gentle affirmation to himself, to the listener, at the album’s close, to keep going, “don’t let the dark take you whole”. It’s the hope-tinged bleakness that gets you.
Recorded with his live band over the course of two visits to Eastbourne’s Echo Zoo Studios, Holy Waters also marks a sharp departure from the solo bedroom productions of early EP releases, 2017’s ‘Swum Baby’ and 2018’s ‘Blood Loss’, an isolated approach that was later enforced upon his debut album during lockdown. Writing his decade-long struggle with insomnia into an album of uncannily nocturnal music felt like a selfless act at Emes, hazily allowing others to drift through sleep states at his expense – Puma Blue, the unwavering jukebox, wide awake. “I look back at [In Praise of Shadows] and feel grateful that I managed to express what I was going through”, he says reflectively, his choice of the singular pronoun feeling all the more significant as he continues, “but this time, when I sit down and listen to a tune, I get more excited because it’s what my friends were doing, from their brains in that moment and we managed to record it.”
“A hazy dreamland for listeners to get lost in” - NME ****
“Music of real tension and originality” - The Sunday Times
“Puma Blue processes [his] pain with a hypnotic tenderness” - Billboard
“A wonderfully bleary-eyed focus that ties together jazz, ambient, acoustic singer-songwriter and blues in one beautiful stretched reverie” - Loud & Quiet
Puma Blue – Pretty (video) : https://youtu.be/-clS20VzO28
