The Golden Hour

Kieran Leonard’s third album was written and recorded while the singer was hunkered down in East Berlin through a bitterly cold winter during the height of lockdown, Nathan Saoudi and Alex White from notoriously debauched South London degenerates The Fat White Family serving as both his musical collaborators and guides through the city’s illicit underbelly. The resulting atmosphere of paranoia and psychological collapse blows through The Golden Hour like an icy wind along Karl Marx Strasse, reflecting in the stark Teutonic aesthetic the trio fashioned from the city’s musical past.

Indeed, from the temptations lurking beneath opener “Threshold”’s twinkling synthscapes, to “Feel to Feel”’s desolate Weimar cabaret, and the suffocating S&M techno throb of “Tell Me the Truth,” it’s a record so evocative of its place of origin that it should come with a bottle of glühwein and map of the S-Bahn. With Brian Eno even gifting Leonard an unfinished instrumental from Bowie’s Lodger sessions to work on (“The Red Book”), The Golden Hour is a worthy addition to the classic ‘Berlin album’ canon.