Sam Foster Smith’s debut EP, South West Summer, is a collection of tracks assembled and arranged at home, wrestling with themes of a place you grew up in becoming one you can return to only in memory. Diving into themes of leaving home, looking back, and choosing what to carry with you, South West Summer is an indie-rock pop-enthusiast marvel far beyond his years.
Recorded in Wigan via Gareth Nuttall’s Lounge Studios, where it was mixed and later mastered by Grant Berry, Sam now finds himself between London and the West Country, building an audience through live shows, radio and press support.
“South West Summer is a record that’s very dear to my heart.” Sam explains, “It’s a distillation of all the sepia-drenched memories I have from my time growing up within spitting distance of the tide line down south, and the growing pains I’ve endured since displacing myself in pursuit of a life lived through music. Musically, I wanted to keep the lyric-focused, anthemic quality in the songs and do them justice with big arrangements, but also suffuse them with acoustic textures to make them sparkle and shine with a sense of nostalgia. As with all my music, I put these tracks together and arranged all the parts by myself in my living room – fuelled by coffee and big dreams – before taking them up to be tracked professionally at Gareth Nuttall’s Lounge Studios in Wigan. Gareth then mixed them, and Grant Berry mastered them. From the title track’s dive into being a teenage tearaway to the soaring coming-of-age arrangement of Daedalus, my hope was that these songs could be read as stories with or without music – I think I may have just managed it, but I’ll let you be the judge! Drink neat, with salt on your lips and sand between your toes.”
Stream the ambitious new EP today, below:
