Jack Ward - Smooth Cream Pop
- 1Bully for You
- 2Spiritlines
- 3You Keep Fooling Me
02
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Open edition
Jack Ward is a producer from Limerick, Ireland, based in Manchester, UK. His new release ‘Smooth Cream Pop’ offers three delightfully sweet upbeat dance tracks informed by his love of pristine pop and filtered house. If 2022’s ‘A Gift from Me to You’ showed Ward’s sense of frivolity, with track titles like ‘Baby Gay Track’ and ‘Sotofett Gig Harry Potter’, Smooth Cream Pop is more direct in its desire to get you dancing.
Opener ‘Bully For You’ leads with slinky guitar loops and crisp percussion making way for a cheeky yet inspired harmonica theme. Sultry, whispered vocals ask “are you ready”, as the track builds on its already euphoric tendencies. Just under four minutes, and with a glorious ambient coda, it’s a perfect crystallisation of Ward’s influences and impulses. Think I. Jordan or Finn with more overt pop sensibilities.
‘Spiritlines’ uses heartfelt yet indecipherable vocal samples to speak of lost love, with synthetic horn sounds dancing deftly over a breakneck tempo. Carefully balanced layers of percussion coalesce to add heft to the otherwise delicate production, every element sitting exactly in place to display true mastery of craft. That impulse transcends to the release’s artwork, a camp and playful adoption of the visual signifiers of construction workwear made in collaboration with Matt Moorhouse and Johannes Schreiner via Live from Earth.
‘You Keep Fooling Me’ opens with a country twang, but its main theme is an unknowable synth line that evokes heads-down dance-floor intensity. The track is a bright and summery number built as much for daytime terrace dances as sweaty underground clubs. It’s a fitting end to this brief yet powerful release.
Made possible by funding from the Irish Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
Opener ‘Bully For You’ leads with slinky guitar loops and crisp percussion making way for a cheeky yet inspired harmonica theme. Sultry, whispered vocals ask “are you ready”, as the track builds on its already euphoric tendencies. Just under four minutes, and with a glorious ambient coda, it’s a perfect crystallisation of Ward’s influences and impulses. Think I. Jordan or Finn with more overt pop sensibilities.
‘Spiritlines’ uses heartfelt yet indecipherable vocal samples to speak of lost love, with synthetic horn sounds dancing deftly over a breakneck tempo. Carefully balanced layers of percussion coalesce to add heft to the otherwise delicate production, every element sitting exactly in place to display true mastery of craft. That impulse transcends to the release’s artwork, a camp and playful adoption of the visual signifiers of construction workwear made in collaboration with Matt Moorhouse and Johannes Schreiner via Live from Earth.
‘You Keep Fooling Me’ opens with a country twang, but its main theme is an unknowable synth line that evokes heads-down dance-floor intensity. The track is a bright and summery number built as much for daytime terrace dances as sweaty underground clubs. It’s a fitting end to this brief yet powerful release.
Made possible by funding from the Irish Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
