Music

Westerman: ‘Music is an incredibly helpful thing to have in difficult times’

The west London singer-songwriter, loved by Perfume Genius, on making softly powerful alt-pop that feels like a warm hug

The last cliche anyone needs to hear more of now is how the music that’s coming out is “perfect for these unprecedented times”. But what we do need are songs that are like a hug. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Nick Drake; I’m finding that helpful,” says Westerman, first name Will, from his home in west London. “There’s something quite comforting about music that feels close and that isn’t presenting any kind of front – it has a naivety to it.”

Funny, because that’s exactly the effect of Westerman’s own forthcoming debut album, Your Hero Is Not Dead, whose songs recall the lithe tenderness of Drake, Arthur Russell and Peter Gabriel. It melds folk, R&B and spacious, serene 80s synthpop, Westerman’s choirboy vocals like blowing on bottle tops. Perfume Genius has recognised its soft power: the musician recently told Q magazine that he had been playing its lead single Blue Comanche on loop because he found it “soothing”.

“I was trying to make something hopeful,” says Westerman, although he isn’t able to create music that’s too buoyant as it “seems escapist and trite – and that’s not how life is”. Like many, he has felt the world going in “the wrong direction; from the Brexit vote and American politics to the environment, there’s a multitude of things to overcome.” And that’s before we’ve even got to the C-word. “As a young person starting out in the world,” he adds, “the view isn’t great.”

Your Hero Is Not Dead is “a personal response” to those “anxieties and fears”, and finding a way through them. His lyrics aren’t particularly prescriptive, although Big Nothing Glow, about encountering a childhood friend who lived rough on the streets, cuts more than most. The album luxuriates in mood and tone instead: it sounds both melancholy and sanguine, “the sweet point in pop music between happiness and sadness,” says Westerman, “where it seems to be both.”

The album was produced by Nathan Jenkins, AKA Bullion, who has been quietly shaping the sound of the UK’s lo-fi pop underground since 2012. “Good pop,” Jenkins says, is about “songs that devastate, not alienate”. But they shouldn’t be dismal. “It’s too easy to go to that darker place to seem like a serious artist. Hopeful music is a harder balance to strike but, when it’s sincere, that can be infinitely more human.”

Westerman doesn’t have any answers about the future, but his music feels gently reassuring. “I’m glad that I didn’t make a super-bleak record,” he says, and he’s happy to be releasing it now and not pushing it back. “Music for me is an incredibly helpful thing to have in difficult times, and I think this is a very difficult time. Hopefully, people can take something from it.” Or at the very least, feel a warm hug.

Your Hero Is Not Dead is out on Friday 5 June