Willie J Healey has announced new EP 143, due 4th September via V2, alongside lead single ‘Ditch’.
The EP brings together 4-track home recordings with sessions made alongside Loren Humphrey in New York, the producer behind Healey’s acclaimed 2023 album Bunny. The result is deliberately low-key: no bells and whistles, direct, immediate and personal. “It feels good to me to make my own kind of mixtape,” Healey has said. “A compilation of my favourites.”
The title is borrowed from a pager code: when a friend sent him the digits 143, Healey took a while to realise it translates to “I love you,” each number representing the letter count of each word. “I thought hey, that’s a nice way of not being too soppy,” he has said. The sentimentality is there in the music too: groove-laced, vintage-textured and lyrically alert, with Healey’s particular ability to find the universal in the observed and the romantic entirely intact.
‘Ditch’ is the EP’s lead single. “I just sat there with my arms open and it fell down to me,” Healey has said of writing it. “A gift from the tape lords, Loren Humphrey at the wheel, me in the passenger seat with the windows all the way down. It’s a feeler about old fashioned brains, Romeo and Juliet type situations, being young and scared.”
A short UK headline tour follows the EP’s release in October, alongside a Truck Festival appearance on 25th July and a support slot for Sea Power at Chalk in Brighton on 22nd October.
25 Jul – Truck Festival, Oxford
8 Oct – Just Dropped In, Coventry
9 Oct – Bootleg Social, Blackpool
10 Oct – Tenement Trail, Glasgow
22 Oct – Chalk, Brighton (supporting Sea Power)
23 Oct – Boia Festival, St Davids
