Daley releases the album Strange Nature and opens a 27-city US tour

Daley has released Strange Nature, ten songs through the SRG-ILS imprint at Virgin Music and UMG, and has gone straight out on the road behind it: a 27-city United States tour that opened in St. Louis.

The gap before this record was long enough to need explaining, and the singer has been direct about what filled it. The album was shaped by the pandemic, by the death of his father and by the structural upheaval that has reordered the independent side of the business, and the title is an admission rather than a mood. He had wanted the title of his first album in years to point at growth and flourishing, he said, but in his soul he knew that was only half of what the process had actually been.

What he settled on instead was the duality: that the strange parts of a life are beautiful and ugly in equal measure, and that a creative weight came off once he accepted he could not always control or understand the nature of things. It is an unusually unflattering thing for an artist to say about his own record, and it is also the most useful description of how Strange Nature actually plays.

The rollout started in the spring with LAVENDER, his first official release since 2018, written and produced with the British producer Swindle and built as a slow meditation on emotional surrender. SLIDE followed in the summer, an R&B bounce with orchestral strings under it, and HEADLIGHTS arrived earlier this month, reuniting him with Marsha Ambrosius and picking up playlisting across Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora and Audiomack.

The album's guest list reaches further than the singles suggest. Robert Glasper plays on COMPASS, a song about finding a way back to somebody across physical or emotional distance, which grew out of an unplanned studio session with Glasper at the piano and eventually brought in Aliyah Niambi and Justin Tyson. Keyon Harrold's trumpet is elsewhere on the record.

The track Daley is most pointed about is EASY, which he has described as a compassionately cut-throat breakup song: the moment a relationship is understood to be finished rather than the argument that ends it. He co-wrote it in London with Ryan Ashley, and it carries piano arrangements by Darryl Woodson and strings by Izzi Dunn and Neil Waters.

He credited the people around him with getting the thing finished at all, saying friends, supporters and listeners made sure he knew his contribution was needed, and that "I truly feel this spurred me on to produce the best album I have ever made." Whether that holds up is a matter for listeners, but the sentence explains the shape of the campaign: a record made slowly and then pushed out with a tour attached rather than trailed for months.

Strange Nature is streaming, downloadable and on sale now, and tour tickets are on sale. We reported the album when it was dated for 18 September, and it lands in a rnb-soul autumn that has also brought Syd's third solo album Beard. The record sits on the release calendar and the US dates on the tour guide.