Atlanta’s Puma Blue says new album, out Friday, embodies loss and loneliness

Puma Blue’s Jacob Allen, a Londoner who moved to Atlanta in 2021, will release his second album Friday, Sept. 1, and kick off a tour that starts in Paris and ends back in the city he now calls home.

“Living here, it’s added a new dimension of my appreciation for the community and everything that Atlanta is,” he said. Allen’s partner is from the area, and his first visits here were to visit her.

“Obviously I have extremely positive associations with it, but I always just loved Atlanta. It was energetically in sync with me,” he said. “There’s a strangeness that’s accepted here, and the weather’s gorgeous. I fell in love with the smells, the sounds of cicadas in summer, all the beautiful food.”

Credit: Courtesy of Puma Blue

Credit: Courtesy of Puma Blue

“Holy Waters,” Puma Blue’s new album from Blue Flower Records, rides the sounds of indie rock. Puma Blue will tour Europe in September and then kick off a North American run of shows in San Diego. The grand finale will be a Nov. 22 concert at Atlanta’s Terminal West, Allen’s first appearance there.

Heightening his connection to his adopted city was a set on the main stage at Atlanta’s Shaky Knees Festival in May.

“Getting to play Shaky Knees was pretty surreal,” he said. “Obviously I’ll always have my roots in London. But being a resident and getting to play the local festival just felt very cool.”

Although Puma Blue started off as a solo project, it has evolved. “Puma Blue” now refers to both Allen himself and the musicians who play with him. Those bandmates are all based in the U.K., though, so he headed back across the pond to record the follow-up to his 2021 debut album, “In Praise of Shadows.”

They recorded the second album at Echo Zoo in Eastbourne, on England’s south coast.

“Most of the time we were there it was incredibly gray, and it’s right by the sea,” Allen said. “Something about this gray, coastal environment — I think really affected some of the sonics and later the visual aesthetics.”

Credit: Natalie Hewitt

The setting was a fitting backdrop for Puma Blue’s music, in which moods take precedence over traditional song structures, and waves of shimmering guitar create the soundtrack to a hazy dream. Track lengths vary wildly and tempos change frequently.

Everything centers on Allen’s soulful singing and the sounds of his trusty Fender Telecaster guitar, with lyrics largely focused on loss.

“I was trying to be sincere and write whatever felt real to me at the time,” he said. “But about halfway through, I started to realize that a lot of the songs were either specifically, directly about death or were using death as a metaphor for something else. When I was finishing up some of the songs towards the end, I was probably leaning into the theme of grief and loss and acceptance of death as a greater power.”

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The first single, “Pretty,” features breathy vocals, tasteful instrumentation and heartfelt lyrics, a perfectly languid moment for summertime listening. On the chorus of the up-tempo “Hounds,” Allen’s guitar mirrors his voice to hypnotic effect, and the song takes a sharp turn with a slightly chaotic saxophone solo from Harvey Grant. The song originated in December 2020, with pandemic isolation heightening the fact that Allen and his partner were on opposite sides of the Atlantic for several months.

“I wrote ‘Hounds’ from this place of loneliness,” he said. “I’d never written anything that dark in color. There was something about the demo that felt already finished and yet it was such a first draft.”

Enter the collaboration that marks this latest phase of Puma Blue music.

“The idea to drop the drums out in the second verse was Ellis Dupuy’s idea, which is a beautiful example of his ability as a drummer to suggest: ‘Maybe this section doesn’t have drums,’” Allen said. “I think that shows a lot of grace.”

Mixer and track producer Sam Petts-Davies experimented with bass sounds “to make it sound less like a prog rock song, and bringing it back to that trip-hop thing” captured in the demo.

At the same time, guitarist Luke Bower reassured Allen about the effectiveness of the lyrics. “I think it’s a process I want to keep up in this band, working with those guys. It’s pushed the music far beyond what I can do on my own,” he said.

Falsetto is a recognizable feature in Puma Blue’s sound. Allen’s talent for it is obvious, and his songs benefit from judicious use of it.

“Most of the time I let the song dictate to me what it wants first,” he said. “I just will sing it from the heart. That will mostly lay the groundwork for when I use falsetto and when I don’t.”

Falsetto has always been a part of his vocal style, he said, noting the influences of D’Angelo and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

Visuals are an integral part of the Puma Blue aesthetic. Allen recently directed the video for the “Holy Waters” track “O, The Blood!”

“I’ve always felt it was important to put a lot of love into my own visuals, to carry the music further, not in terms of success, but in terms of the significance of it to the listener,” he said. “I think that accompanied by my natural love for film. It’s always felt like a very natural symbiosis.”