The The — Ensoulment (2024)
A long-awaited return shaped by age, clarity, and the quiet gravity of lived experience.
By Rafi Mercer
There are albums that feel like a fresh beginning, and there are albums that arrive as if they’ve been forming in the dark for years. Ensoulment is the latter. When The The re-emerged after nearly a quarter-century without a new studio album, it wasn’t with fanfare or reinvention. It was with something quieter, older, and more deliberate — the sound of a writer who has lived long enough to let the world tilt, settle, and tilt again, and who has finally found the right moment to speak.
From the opening bars, the record feels inhabited. Not performed, not produced, but lived in. Matt Johnson has always written with a philosopher’s seriousness and a street poet’s instincts, but here the voice is different. It carries a weight that isn’t theatrical — a low, burnished baritone worn down by time in the best possible way. It’s the sound of someone who has carried his questions long enough for them to lose their sharp edges and gain something else: gravity.
The textures tell their own story. Drums that stay close to the chest. Bass lines that walk rather than strut. Horns that appear like signals from another room. And underneath it all, those keys — electric, acoustic, sometimes little more than a harmonic mist — forming the emotional glue of the record. Nothing feels rushed. Nothing tries to impress. Everything moves as if guided by a kind of moral tempo, slow enough to let the thought land, steady enough to keep the song upright.
What stands out most is the clarity of intention. This is not an album looking for a moment or a headline. It is a collection of meditations: on truth and illusion, on love and solitude, on mortality, on the strange heaviness of the modern world. Johnson no longer hides these questions inside metaphor; he states them plainly, almost tenderly. “Where do we go when we die?” is not framed as philosophy. It’s sung like a question asked across a kitchen table in the quiet of the evening. “Some Days I Drink My Coffee by the Grave of William Blake” is not a provocation. It’s a portrait of someone trying to stay connected to spiritual lineage in a culture that rewards noise over meaning.
There is a political current, too, but it runs differently than in the band’s early years. The anger is still there, but it is tempered by sorrow, by weariness, by an awareness of how deep the roots of the problem now go. These songs don’t shout. They observe. They trace lines. They catalogue human costs. Johnson seems less interested in calling out villains and more interested in asking how a soul stays intact while navigating the world those villains helped create.
Played in the right conditions — late light, quiet room, a system that favours tone over treble — Ensoulment unfolds like a slow conversation. The band breathes with him. Instruments drift in and out not for effect, but because the song needs them in that precise moment. There’s a generosity in the arrangements, a trust in silence, a refusal to fill every corner. The record understands that space can carry emotion as effectively as sound.
What lingers after the final track is not the instrumentation or even the themes, but the feeling of companionship. Johnson isn’t preaching, diagnosing, or grandstanding. He’s sharing the view from where he stands — a man older now, a man who has seen the world twist itself into shapes he could never have imagined in the 1980s, a man who still believes music can hold the complexity of being human. The ache, the humour, the brokenness, the stubborn hope — it’s all in there.
Ensoulment is not a comeback. It’s a continuation. A deep breath taken after a very long sentence. A reminder that maturity in music isn’t about softness or resignation, but about perspective. The courage to speak plainly. The discipline to leave space. The wisdom to let a song feel its age.
And that is what makes it so quietly powerful: it’s an album that asks to be listened to the way older people speak when they trust you — slowly, openly, with the understanding that not every truth needs to be wrapped in a flourish. Some truths just need a voice willing to carry them.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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