It’s a record that feels less like a compilation and more like a carefully considered journey through the mind of one of contemporary music’s most thoughtful and prolific creators. (As an aside worth noting, in 2025, Paul’s discography of more than 600 tracks across 60+ releases was made a permanent part of the British Library’s prestigious Sound & Moving Image collection. Pure legacy.)

The piano is at the absolute heart of everything here. But it’s not piano as a performance piece, it’s piano as a living, breathing emotional language, used to paint scenes, conjure moods, reassure, ache, and occasionally devastate. The collaborators assembled around Paul are equally impressive, including mixer Sam Okell (Project Hail Mary, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) and masterer Alex Wharton (Radiohead, Paul McCartney), a level of craft that elevates every track without ever overwhelming the intimacy that is this album’s greatest gift.

‘Memento Mori’ opens with quiet intent, moody, almost church-like, with a comforting synth underlayer and drums that build dramatically without ever obscuring the piano at its centre. It is a meditation on the fragility of life and the instruction to be present within it, and it does that work without a single word. ‘Three Years of Roses’ strips things back beautifully, piano and guitar moving around each other with quiet grace, the layered vocals in the final third bringing to mind the elegant builds of Aqualung, the kind of musical architecture that seems effortless right up until the moment it takes your breath away.

‘Rust Mountain (Monochrome Piano Version)’ closes the album entirely differently, bass keys in deep conversation with a higher melody, dramatic and layered, a monochrome piano rework that somehow holds every ounce of the original’s power. And ‘We Shape The Clouds’ offers the album’s most quietly devastating lyric writing, “grounded is a well-made wish”, and “a fragile certainty.” Understated impact. ‘Cygnus’, meanwhile, builds toward an emotional peak with thundery undertones and a vocal of striking clarity, “let these stars align, if only for now”, an open invitation to get completely lost in the moment.

‘Alternative Piano Club’ is a record for the depths of the night and the reflective heart in equal measure, cinematic without being distant, emotional without being overwrought, and technically brilliant without ever forgetting that music’s first job is to make you feel something. If you love your piano and think you know how it should sound, let this album open up something completely new.

2nd June 2026