Jamie woon - sharpness 

Samantha Potter

It’s been over four years since the release of his first album Mirrorwriting, but Jamie Woon has just released his new single, Sharpness; the first from a long-awaited follow-up to be released later this year. Since the release of the previous album, which achieved relative success at number 15 in the UK album charts, Woon seemed to have disappeared: he retained a low profile and no new material surfaced in the four intervening years. With a similarly lengthy delay between the release of his first single and the debut album, it seems evident that Jamie Woon is not one to rush.

The previously unsolved question of where exactly Jamie Woon disappeared to in this time was finally answered in an interview following the premiere of Sharpness on Pharrell’s Beats 1 radio show. Woon admitted that “if I haven’t got music to release, I keep a low profile…there’s TV to watch and burgers to eat”. But that isn’t to say that this unhealthy portrayal of Woon can account for the entire four years of his withdrawal from the public eye.

Now signed to the same label as Disclosure, Jessie Ware and Cyril Hahn, Jamie Woon confirmed that he has been spending much of this time working on a new album. As opposed to his first album, which was almost entirely electronic, Woon has been utilising the ‘dying art’ of recording with live musicians. Having a live band to work with has allowed Woon to create the type of rhythms and sounds he was seeking, taking inspiration from D’Angelo’s second album Voodoo. 

However, with obvious retro soul and funk influences, Jamie Woon’s Sharpness is perhaps quite apart from his fans’ anticipant expectations. The fresh sounding neo-soul track, which has been given the push it needs from Pharrell’s airplay, is certainly a promising indicator of what’s to come in the as-yet unnamed follow-up.