New Music Monday - Johnny Flynn

And you may ask yourself, "Isn't that the actor from Lovesick?". And you may find yourself binging that show. Letting the days go by, putting the Talking Heads lyrical jokes aside, yes, that is the actor from the Channel 4-cum-Netflix show formerly known as Scrotal Recall. You might have also caught his dramatic turn in Song One opposite Anne Hathaway, but you might not know that Johnny Flynn has been a musician for longer than he's been an actor.

His new album, Sillion, came out on March 24, cementing his status at the heart of England's antifolk scene. This South African-English multi-hyphenate runs the gamut from muscular guitar-driven rock to delicately instrumented chamber pop and psychedelic freak folk on the record. The protagonist of his song "Wandering Aengus", vacillates between moments of epic boredom and fleeting fantasies of escape in the name of the Irish god of youth, poetic inspiration, and love. He turns that incisive wit inward on "Heart Sunk Hank", name-checking Lord Tennyson and musing fatalistically. Recorded partially in a 1940s Voice-O-Graph booth, the purposefully retro audio and extended trailing notes recall nothing so much as early Neutral Milk Hotel.