James Ellis Ford shares The Ever After from his coming solo album

James Ellis Ford released "The Ever After," a new single from his second solo album, "Lost in Another World," NME and DIY reported on August 4. The pulsating electronic track carries a message to his eight-year-old son, Frank. "It might seem a little odd to be trying to write dance music from a hospital bed, but I was trying to lift my mood," Ford said.

Ford wrote and recorded the entire album in just over two weeks in early 2025, working from a hospital bed between rounds of chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukaemia. He built the tracks on a laptop and microphone his wife brought in, describing the sessions to NME as a way of processing a diagnosis that made him confront his own mortality for the first time.

Ford described the whole process as a kind of self-talk. "It was a pep talk; I was telling myself I was going to be OK," he told DIY. "It gave me the ammunition to fight the experience and was a distraction from it." The album's lead single and opening track, "Overtones," arrived the previous month, with "The Ever After" landing as the record's tenth of twelve songs.

Known for his production work with Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Blur, Pulp and Fontaines D.C., Ford previously released his debut solo album, "The Hum," in 2023, and helmed the recent charity compilation "Help(2)" for War Child, which was shortlisted for this year's Mercury Prize. "Lost in Another World" is due August 14 via Domino, and Ford plays Green Man Festival on August 22 ahead of a headline show at London's Horse Hospital on September 17.

Our own coverage has kept following the record's story since: a later piece looked at the album itself, recorded inside a London hospital, and another covered a documentary tracking how the album came together on a cancer ward. It's filed under our electronic coverage.