Blaine Harrison saw Yoko Ono’s “A Hole to See the Sky Through” at the British Museum, bought a postcard of it, and kept it by his front door for years. It was still there when the pandemic cancelled the album he’d been working on. He and his father Henry, an actual architect, eventually started writing songs around the postcard instead. The title track came first. Everything else grew outward from it.
That’s a fitting way to build a record for a band who’ve spent twenty years chasing something bigger than themselves. Mystery Jets formed on Eel Pie Island as teenagers and have been getting stranger and more ambitious ever since; this is their seventh album, and their first in six years since 2020’s A Billion Heartbeats. Henry’s architectural instincts show throughout: these songs are built, not just written, each one considering how you enter it and where it takes you before you leave.
Opener ‘A Hole to See the Sky Through I’ sets the blueprint, droning synths and a crisp, grounding snare underneath Harrison’s minor-key vocal, the whole thing constructed like a slow reveal rather than a statement: I’m weak, I’m lonely and numb. ‘Black Sage’ answers with something heavier, guitarist Ollie Taylor’s fuzz pushing the track somewhere more unstable while Harrison stays composed above it. ‘Flea Joint’ is the record’s best trick, a funky bassline and a Madchester swagger that turns the noise of a London Underground platform into something worth dancing to.
Not every room in this house needed building, though. ‘Anaglypta’ runs past seven minutes on E Street piano and nostalgia that never quite earns its length, stillness without the depth stillness is supposed to buy.
The album closes by returning to its own blueprint. ‘A Hole to See the Sky Through II’ builds guitars and voices back up toward a big, yearning finish, landing on the idea that not getting what you want might mean getting what you actually need. It’s a tidier resolution than the record’s messier middle stretch deserves, but it’s an honest one.
Twenty years on from Eel Pie Island, Mystery Jets are still building rooms around a single postcard, still finding just enough sky through the gap to keep going. Most of this record earns that patience. A little of it just sits there waiting for you to notice.
