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When A24 announced the arrival of their supplemental record label earlier this year, fans couldn’t help but wait in irrepressible anticipation for the expansion of the beloved film production company as they made their foray into the world of music. What they got was the elusive yet masterful songwriter, mark william lewis.
Hailing from South London, mark williams lewis’ started crafting his sound while studying art at Goldsmiths College of London. He cut his teeth recording lo-fi guitar records in his humble Deptford apartment, which would later culminate in early EPs like Pleasure Is Everything and God Complex, introducing his gloomy, melancholic sound to London’s underground scene.
Growing up surrounded by poetry and literature, lewis drew influence from writers like James Joyce and Allen Ginsberg as well as folk mainstay Bob Dylan. His literary background is evident in his fragmented, imagistic lyrics that often blur truth and metaphor.
He quietly dropped his debut album, Living, in 2023, a true-to-form singer-songwriter project that showed early signs of his knack for sharing vulnerability through his pen. Later that year, he’d have his breakout feature on MIKE’s track “Let’s Have a Ball,” on his album Burning Desire. Earlier this year, he joined the Brooklyn emcee to accompany him with guitar for his NPR Tiny Desk performance.
His latest self-titled A24 debut is lewis’ in his purest form. Here, his writing occupies the space between haunting and thoughtfully endearing, with poetic introspection as intimate as turning the pages of his personal journal entries through every track. It’s raw, yet sonically polished, toting a deep cinematic quality.
lewis’ sound and writing style have been compared to peers like Dean Blunt and Nourished by Time. His baritone voice and somber delivery communicate an irremissible feeling of grief found in solitude, with a glimmer of hope peaking in between each stanza.
mark william lewis stands as one of the UK’s most compelling new artists. With his A24-backed debut, he’s proved to be one of music’s most thoughtful songwriters, bringing listeners into his foggy world of memory and dream-like intimacy.
