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‘I was playing with fire’: One True Pairing’s Tom Fleming on Wild Beasts, breakdown – and his brilliant comeback

After his old band split, Fleming struggled to launch a solo career – then the pandemic forced him to confront his mental health and addiction issues. The reckoning prompted a miraculous back-to-basics record

Fleming recorded it in 2022 with Lankum producer John “Spud” Murphy, near Dublin, the electronics and US heartland stuff replaced by heavy, hymnal folk that feels lashed with saltwater, thick with earth, possessed of a thousand-yard stare into the dark of night. Fleming hopes that listeners will recognise the difference between an “earnest singer-songwriter, Jack Johnson-esque thing” and him channelling the American primitive guitar and new weird Americana he loved as a teenager, music whose “endless mystery you can pull with very few colours on the palette. Fleming’s first solo album also satirised what he saw as “commodified” discourse about toxic masculinity, with lacerating lyrical portraits of blokes who “took out a loan and smashed the whole thing in Ibiza”; boys he grew up around with a “collection of knives and the porn printed in black and white”.

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