Rock

THE ALBUM
An Inbuilt Fault, out Friday (May 5) on Partisan Records. 

THE ORIGIN

You wouldn’t recognize the Westerman of 2016. In the earliest days of his life as a professional artist, Will Westerman sported long, curly hair and played folk music that most often earned him comparisons to Nick Drake. By the time he began getting more notoriety, he had totally transformed. Now in his early thirties, he keeps his hair shorn close and wears sleeker clothes, mirroring the evolution of his music. 

In the late ‘10s, he began collaborating with the producer and fellow Londoner Bullion, who helped Westerman achieve a more electronic sheen. His early singles — including the breakthrough 2018 track “Confirmation,” which ignited a flurry of blog hype — had an alien quality, singer-songwriter fare put through a strange, otherworldly filter. 

Since “Confirmation,” the path has been as circuitous as Westerman’s exploratory songwriting. His debut album, Your Hero Is Not Dead, was finished and ready for release in 2019, but he alludes to various speed bumps caused by some people who “behaved badly.” Eventually it arrived right in the summer of 2020, with Westerman unable to tour or promote it properly due to the pandemic. Afterwards, he underwent a crisis of faith, wondering whether he wanted to release music anymore. “It took me about a year to get back in the headspace where I thought it was worth making music again,” he admits. “I remembered why all this stuff started in the first place.”

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THE SOUND

Part of the power in Westerman’s recent music is the contrast between warped guitars and synth textures, and Westerman himself. He has always had a rich, expressive voice — it can be crystalline, but also not without a smoky huskiness. As a child, Westerman sang in choirs, and recently found solace in revisiting unaccompanied plainsong as a way of reconnecting with the human voice during long stretches of lockdown isolation. It gives him a unique melodic sensibility, where he may wind and surge beyond the lines we usually associate with pop song structures. 

Sophomore album An Inbuilt Fault was intended to be serpentine and unpredictable as well. “I wanted it to feel very close, and less sculpted,” Westerman says. “I wanted it to have a breathing quality.” At the time, he was demoing over polyrhythmic loops, experimenting and writing for himself without any expectation of necessarily finishing another album. In addition to the comfort of choral music, he was digging way into krautrock. “It was the sense of freedom, the sound of freeform expression,” he recalls. “It was the music I needed at that time.” 

While Westerman’s guitar is still pivotal to his music, An Inbuilt Fault takes the organic/artificial tension of his music to a new extreme, putting his voice to the forefront over a newly percussive backdrop. Abandoning the beats of past recordings, he wanted to embrace playing live in a room with human beings again — once he was finally able to. An Inbuilt Fault ended up being a document of a group of musicians wrestling an elusive sound into being, all tumbling drums and guitars surrounded by all manner of flickering, alluring textures at the songs’ edges. 

THE RECORD

With everything on hold, Westerman decided it was time to try a big life change he’d thought about for years — he wanted to move to Athens. Embarking on a “half-baked” plan to live in a van in the Balkans, he started across Europe and stopped to visit his father in rural Italy for a week. Thanks to more COVID lockdowns, he ended up being there for six months.

For all that time, Westerman had very little human interaction aside from seeing his father. He began writing songs again, mostly as a way of keeping himself sane, but eventually saw an album taking shape. When it was time to record, he reached out to Big Thief drummer/producer James Krivchenia — who he’d briefly hit it off with at a show immediately before the pandemic — and with Krivchenia’s touch and ear for percussion, An Inbuilt Fault has that more alive feeling Westerman was looking for. 

“I wanted to jump off the cliff creatively,” Westerman says. “I wanted to put myself in an environment that was completely alien to me as a way of trying to grow, to break out of the solipsistic way the music had been forming up until that point.” 

That isn’t to say the core ethos of Westerman’s writing was lost in the process. The music unspools and ambles, so it takes longer for these songs to sink into your head, but they don’t leave once they’re there. His melodies are as gorgeous as ever: one of the album’s most simultaneously jarring and transcendent moments is when he slides into the chorus of “Idol:RE-Run,” which happens to wring a hilarious amount of beauty out of the word “motherf–ker.” (“It wakes you up,” he quips.) Meanwhile, “A Lens Turning” uses a dexterous, knotty groove as underpinning for navigating a similarly tangled existential crisis. Closer “Pilot Was A Dancer” has an almost ‘90s alt-rock tone to it, a cathartic burst of guitars as Westerman tells an apocalyptic story about the last human being alive on Earth.

Though Westerman’s songs are inspired by an array of experiences, both his and others, he rarely is autobiographical. At the same time, he acknowledges much of An Inbuilt Fault is traversing relatively dark themes, its title a reflection on our inherent fallibility. At the end of it all, he’s made another striking album that also feels like a hard reset after the ellipsis of 2020. It feels like he’s starting again. 

THE FUTURE

Westerman did eventually make it to Athens, and his early days there were wild — things were just reopening, and parties thronged the streets at all hours of the night. One of the singles from An Inbuilt Fault, “CSI: Petralona,” is a rare moment that does derive more directly from Westerman’s actual life, inspired by a “near-death” experience and the kindness of strangers. But since then, it seems he’s settled into his new life in Greece. 

“It’s almost the opposite of London,” he muses. “It’s slow-paced. It’s lugubrious chaos. Nothing really works very well but there’s a strange internal logic to it where it does.” 

With some distance from London, and from the hubs of the music industry in western Europe and North America, Westerman has found he’s been more clear-headed creatively. He’s come out the other side of questioning his life as a musician revitalized and re-centered. “It remains the same irrespective of whether five people are listening or five thousand,” he says. “The scale is irrelevant in terms of process, and when I remember that it is very helpful. I know I’ll continue to do it now in some capacity, because I know I need to do it.” 

To that end, he mentions he’s already close to finishing the recording of another album. 

HIS FAVORITE PIECE OF GEAR

“I’ve been using this Meris Hedra pedal. It has three pitch shifters but it’s got secondary functions of delay and feedback. I think you can make a whole record with just a voice and this pedal. It would be an interesting thing to do that as a confined exercise. I don’t really understand it. It’s such a deep piece of equipment I don’t know half of it.” 

THE ARTIST THAT HE THINKS NEEDS MORE ATTENTION

“There’s loads. There’s an artist called Clara Mann. She’s almost folk revival, slightly maudlin, sadly beautiful minimalistic guitar singer-songwriter. I really enjoyed listening to that yesterday so I’ll go with that now. That’s a difficult question because there’s literally thousands.”

THE THING THAT HE THINKS NEEDS TO CHANGE IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

“I don’t think there is enough protection for artists — in general in the industry, but particularly for younger artists. There’s a disposability culture, where there isn’t really a huge amount of accountability for the way older people in the industry can exploit the good will or naivety of younger people when they’re offering something. It’s not like designing a washing machine. It’s a different sort of thing. 

“I think it would be good that, if [and] when people are exploited through their inexperience, there was some kind of culpability for the people who are doing that. Currently there is none. Seemingly there are very few bodies of people you can go to when things go wrong. Generally the people who carry the financial and emotional burden when those things happen are the people least equipped to do it, and that’s an imbalance that is not right.”

THE PIECE OF ADVICE HE BELIEVES EVERY NEW INDIE ARTIST NEEDS TO HEAR

Westerman pauses for a while, and then says simply: “Keep going.”