Olly Alexander shoots his "Cupid's Bow"

Monday 14th October 2024

Release date: Out now Label: Polydor

Olly Alexander has today unveiled brand new single ‘Cupid’s Bow’, which is available now on Polydor Records. Olly has also confirmed details and the tracklisting of Polari, his much-anticipated new solo album, due for release on February 7th 2025. The landmark project will hit the road next year across the UK and Europe with news of a special intimate, Up Close and Polari tour also announced today: artists pre-sale begins on October 15th at 10AM BST, with promoter pre-sale opening on October 16th and tickets available for general sale on October 18th at 10AM local time.

Exploring themes of desire, intimacy, voyeurism and fate, ‘Cupid’s Bow’ is a compelling return from Olly Alexander. Its pounding club soundscape and nuanced love of the subculture was created alongside Polari collaborator Danny L Harle, with Olly as drawn to electronic pop’s earliest queer trailblazers as contemporary complexities; of love, and where to find it (whether a shot from Eros, or your local cruising spot).

Polari is a pop album for the ages, looking back on history as a means to learn more about yourself. Olly Alexander’s first album under his own name takes as its primary inspiration the (almost) lost art of Polari. Originating around Europe and the Romani community as early as the 1600s, this coded slang became in effect a secret language for homosexuals and the stigmatized during the twentieth century. It’s a concept Olly first came across when coming out, and resonated more deeply with when playing Richie in ‘It’s A Sin’, where he grappled with questions about identity, self-expression and community. The kinds of which have always populated British life, and have long been threaded through the history of pop music- you just had to know where to look. After a decade releasing music as Years & Years, Polari is literally Olly Alexander talking the talk.

He bonded with Danny L Harle over a mutual love of 80s club music, that period of uncompromising, avant-garde pop which nonetheless snuck into the mainstream. Polari remained a north star throughout the creative process, a language likewise lacking widespread recognition but still influential in plain sight (see such colloquialisms as “drag”, “naff” and “trade”). The album arrives alongside audio-visual world-building in which Olly is in complete control, from its anarchic Derek Jarman-inspired aesthetic to Olly even writing a short play accompanying its release, full of cowboys, gods, and the occasional music industry exec. And after a long history of secrets and subtext, Polari is ultimately an open and universal pop record about those needs that transcend time, sexuality, and self: what it means to belong, to be loved, and (Polari literally translates as “to talk”) to connect.

Posted by Craig Jones