J. Bernardt releases Running Days

J. Bernardt is proud to announce that he will release his debut album Running Days on 16 June, 2017 via Play It Again Sam. Today he shares the opening track from the album, ‘On Fire’, as a subtle statement of intent. It’s warm piano chords, persistent guitar hook and gospel infused harmonies melt away as he soulfully laments, “No way back to where we came from”.

It’s an innocuous lyric, but one that nods to both the changing nature of love and a sea-change in J. Bernardt’s sound; as he shifts gears from being in a band known for effervescent ’60’s-tinged indie-pop, towards a deeply personal soul-inflected sound. “Looking back, I suppose I didn’t know what I was making during the making of the album” he says. “But now when I listen to it I find it hard” he pauses, “It’s such an honest record”.

J. Bernardt is the nom de plume of Jinte Deprez, a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, whose career has been largely focused on Belgian pop institution Balthazar, that is, until now. All too often, when artists go solo after a long time in a band, there's a tendency for them to fall into well-trodden routines when writing—something Deprez won’t deny he had to shake off. “I’m a very automatic songwriter, so at first I was still creating Balthazar-style music”, he says. But after experimenting with a Korg PolySix, the project began to evolve, drifting further from his comfort zone as he explains, “Working alone I learned that music’s not hard to create, but it is difficult to finish” he laughs. “And that was the most interesting part of this journey - and definitely what I needed - because when you’re on that kind of path you discover something new about yourself”.