BELLA1523 // 23 February 2024

I've always been on the side of making up scenarios rather than being really honest about my life within my music,” says Jack Kenworthy about his second album Love To You, Mate. “This is the first time I've been able to do that. I've been less scared of it because it's not my story. It’s a shared one.”

The songwriter and producer’s life was upended in February 2021, months before the release of his debut album Wake, when his brother-in-law Greg Baker was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. What followed was the most “unbelievable” year of a family’s togetherness when life seemed set on fracturing the life of a young man. Kenworthy, knowing in particular that he needed to be a pillar of support to his partner Helen, whom he’s since married, found that the family’s journey together in the face of adversity was both brutal and beautiful.

“We were of course so terrified,” Kenworthy remembers of the following Christmas spent in hospital, a memory etched into the album’s title track. “But they're just such positive, kind and inspiring people who had everything thrown at them and handled it all with this incredible togetherness and spirit. We’re all so grateful to have had him in our lives.”

Colouring has been a solo project since Wake, an album influenced by The Blue Nile alongside the 00s post-Britpop greats (early Coldplay, Elbow) but taking electronic and rhythmic cues from Radiohead and James Blake. Originally formed of four friends while he was studying at Goldsmiths, the band came to a natural end in 2019.

Thanks to a confidence boost in early 2020 when Kenworthy’s longtime collaborator Gianluca Buccellati (Arlo Parks) laughed off the idea of him folding the project, Kenworthy did what he usually does: write compulsively as a means of nourishment and escape.