The Polari album from Olly is Here!

Sunday 16th February 2025

Release date: Out now Label: Polydor

Olly Alexander releases his first album under his own name. Polari is Olly’s full disclosure on who he is as an artist; an explorative musical showcase to the world in this moment in time, over a decade into his prolific career as a singer, songwriter, actor and activist - Olly is fast becoming an iconic cultural figure of our times.

Watch the Colin Solal Cardo directed video ‘Whisper In The Waves’ that accompanies the album release and completes a run of aesthetically arresting videos from the acclaimed director.

Polari opens with a strident blast of kinetic pop energy and hastily continues with timeless pop songs throughout. “Recently, I have had this thing where I’m thinking, is this what my creative life should’ve been all along?” says Olly, on the precipice of sharing Polari. “I’m putting out music I love, on my terms, that means something to me.”

Made entirely in universally regarded pop producer, Danny L. Harle’s humble top-floor studios on Hackney Road, right across the road from where Olly’s first misadventures in East End gay clubbing happened, Polari is a luminous baton passed from one era of riveting queer pop history to another. “I was really trying to find what feels like my identity now,” he says. “It all started to make sense as soon as I started making a record there.” He would regale stories of nights gone by to Danny, then they would reimagine them from bricolage sounds nodding to gay clubs past, present, future.

The first song they alighted on was also the first single released from the album, ‘Cupid’s Bow’, a rigorous, dreamlike disco reverie on cruising. The lyric nodding to the same Cupid George Michael sees nothing in the eyes of on ‘Fastlove’, the god of attraction, desire and erotic love. They discovered a mutual obsession with the pop soundscapes that dominated the 1980s but were set on channeling new ways to expose a modern listener to the joy and escapism that music offered across that pivotal decade.

The songs thereafter came easily as they tapped into each others’ pop psyche. Each song started to sound like a hit beamed in from another era, then lent the fairy dust of living in the here and now. The melancholic chug of ‘Archangel’ bled into the vigour and slam of current single ‘When We Kiss.’ The album takes a tender pitstop for, ‘Whisper In The Waves’ and the soft electronic tones of  ‘Beautiful’  before cranking right back up a gear for exiting with ‘Heal You’ and the subject matter overview of ‘Language.’ When Olly’s Eurovision song, ‘Dizzy’, appears with its full Pet Shop Boys’ pomp-indebted introduction midway through Polari, it suddenly all makes sense. By the time they got to producing ‘Make Me a Man’, they were so confident of the passing of time between their inspiration and what was happening in the studio, Olly and Danny approached Depeche Mode, Erasure and Yazoo songwriter-in-chief, Vince Clarke to produce it. “And he said yes,” says Olly, delighted at the production coup. “It couldn’t have worked out better.”

Polari, famously, was the coded, often hilarious language shared between gay men in inter- and post-war Britain. A language that peaked before the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967. Eventually, Polari bled into the mainstream, lending the British vocabulary fabulous new slang like ‘shady’, ‘camp’, ‘drag’, ‘trade’ (for sex) and ‘slap’ (for makeup). Each of which could undercut moments of Olly Alexander’s debut solo album, of sorts. Polari the record is a full investigation of his private thoughts, dressed up as a magnetic succession of anthems for public display. “Just the fact of being gay and having a secret language. That felt like it spoke to me as an artist. That’s what my whole life has been. So it became the thing that defined the best record I’ve ever made.” 

Posted by Craig Jones