London’s jazz-pop futurists Dance Lessons have announced the release of their hotly anticipated debut album Beginners, a lush, emotionally-charged collection written across 2024 and 2025. With their signature blend of jazz, alternative-pop and electronic grooves, Beginners, out July 25, is a bold statement from a band that’s only just beginning.
Today they have shared their new single, the beautifully expansive ‘Hurricane’. The track was written “following a friend’s messy, often beautiful, but turbulent relationship. It’s about people who don’t always get it right, perhaps what they’ve got is even a bit toxic, and yet somewhere in there, we keep going. And maybe if we only can survive each other, we become something else entirely in the process.”
Dance Lessons – made up of Anne (vocals, songwriting, keys, production), Nat (guitars) and Tom (bass, backing vocals) – formed in 2020. Their debut singles dropped mid-pandemic to critical acclaim, and they’ve been carving their own lane ever since. The mission: blur the lines between jazz and pop while making bold, emotionally rich music with high-gloss production – thanks to Anne, the creative force behind the desk in a world where just 3% of charting producers are women.
Across its 10 tracks, Beginners explores “our constantly evolving relationships to each other.” The record’s sound is as expansive as its influences – from Kate Bush and Bowie to Solange and Róisín Murphy – and aims to “trick people who say they don’t like jazz into really digging it.”
The band’s unique sonic palette draws comparisons to SAULT, Jungle, Crazy P, Jai Paul, Kindness and Blood Orange, but the result is unmistakably their own. “We think our music blends anything and everything that we love and would want to hear ourselves.”
Beginners:
- SMABTO
- Hurricane
- New Job
- Insomnia
- Just Chemistry
- Plurality
- I Like Lies
- How Do You Know
- Trauma Repair
- Good Enough
- Eat Your Loyalty
