Westerman - A Jackal's Wedding

Westerman wrote A Jackal's Wedding in Athens and recorded it on the Greek island of Hydra, and that sense of place seeps into every quiet corner.

The London singer-songwriter, Will Westerman, earned a devoted following with Your Hero Is Not Dead and An Inbuilt Fault, but his third album, released in 2025 on Partisan, takes a gentler, more minimal turn. Producer Marta Salogni, who mastered his previous record, helped him build the songs around piano and guitar, tracked in a 17th-century mansion turned art space, with drummers Stella Mozgawa and James Krivchenia adding subtle, supple rhythms.

The result is woozy and dreamlike, a set of songs about leaving, arriving and the spaces in between. "Adriatic" was among the first glimpses of the album, and "About Leaving" spells out its central theme in its title alone. "Nevermind" and "Agnus Dei" lean toward hushed, reflective moods, letting silence and room sound do as much work as the instruments, with the old house itself treated as a collaborator.

It is an album for unhurried listening, best heard in one sitting with the volume low and the evening light fading. Those who followed his earlier art-pop experiments will find him braver here for doing less.